OpenAI reopens its 200-dollar Pro plan but halves API credits as it pushes pay-per-use

OpenAI is reopening its Pro subscription to new sign-ups. The plan costs 200 dollars per month, but the API credits granted for every dollar spent are being cut in half, as The Decoder reported on 29 September 2026.

A 200-dollar plan with fewer credits

The reopening reverses the earlier decision to keep Pro closed to new subscribers. What changes for subscribers is how much API usage they receive for their money: the credit allowance per dollar is halved. OpenAI employee Thibault Sottiaux argues that subscribers will still get more done than a month ago despite the cut.

Cheaper models offset the difference

His argument rests on the models OpenAI shipped this week. GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna cost half the API price of their predecessors. GPT-6 Sol is priced at 2 dollars per million input tokens and 10 dollars per million output tokens. Luna, the cheaper option, costs 0.10 dollars for input and 0.50 dollars for output. That is a 50 percent cut compared with GPT-5.6 Sol and Luna, and OpenAI gives a further 90 percent discount on cached input tokens.

The five-hour cap is gone

Alongside the pricing change, the five-hour usage cap has been removed for good. Subscribers can now spread their weekly allotment however they want instead of running into a limit inside a five-hour window.

Toward pay-per-use pricing

The change points to a broader move away from heavily subsidized subscriptions and toward pay-per-use pricing. Microsoft already bills Copilot this way in some areas. Sottiaux writes that API prices should fall far enough over time “that it makes sense for most to buy usage as needed without there being a significant gap between what you get in a subscription and what you get in the API for a dollar spent.” For AI labs, usage-based billing ties revenue more tightly to the value companies actually pull from the models.