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ChatGPT Pro after DevDay: usage per dollar, Ultrafast drain and picking a plan

After DevDay, users divided OpenAI's new Pro multiples by price and watched Ultrafast empty a weekly limit in under 30 minutes. We checked the math against OpenAI's docs and collected OpenAI's follow-up comments and a guide to picking a plan.

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When OpenAI launched the $500 Pro 500 plan at DevDay on September 29 and halved the Codex and Work allowance of its $200 Pro plan, people started doing arithmetic right away. Divide the new multiples by price and every plan now buys the same amount of usage per dollar. By afternoon, posts showed Ultrafast emptying a weekly limit in under an hour.

Below, we check the math, reactions and OpenAI’s comments against published numbers, then turn to picking a plan. For the launch details, see our posts on Pro 500 and the plan changes and GPT-6.1 Sol and Ultrafast.

At a glance

  • Every plan now buys the same usage per dollar: 5x Plus for every $100. Only existing Pro 200 subscribers, who keep 20x through October 29, get double.
  • Ultrafast draws included plan usage at 8x the Standard rate. The 6x figure people kept citing is the multiplier for credits and API prices.
  • Among personal plans, only Pro 500 has Ultrafast. Other plans can’t use it, even with purchased credits.
  • The weekly-limit-in-30-minutes case involved several tasks on Astra at high reasoning effort, and accounts differ on how many subagents were running.
  • Dots usage won’t count toward plan allowances for a month. The terms after that haven’t been published.

The math users did

The inputs come from OpenAI. Pro 500’s 25x is in the DevDay recap, and the drop from 20x to 10x for Pro 200 is in the email OpenAI sent existing subscribers (one of them posted the full text on Hacker News). Pro 100’s 5x comes from OpenAI’s help page as archived on September 19; the current help and pricing pages list no multiples.

Plan Monthly price Codex and Work usage (vs Plus) Per $100 (vs Plus)
Plus $20 1x 5x
Pro 100 $100 5x 5x
Pro 200, existing subscribers (through Oct 29) $200 20x 10x
Pro 200, new subscribers, and everyone from Oct 30 $200 10x 5x
Pro 500 $500 25x 5x

New Pro 200 subscriptions from September 29 get 10x from the start. Existing subscribers keep 20x through October 29, then drop to 10x on October 30, per the email. From the same date, GPT-6 Pro messages in chat go from 200 to 100 a week, and the price stays at $200. Another popular comparison: going from the old Pro 200 to Pro 500 means 1.25 times the usage for 2.5 times the price.

Existing subscribers also get a one-time grant of 62,500 usage credits, valued at $2,500 and expiring December 31. That makes a credit worth 4 cents, at which the Codex credit rates equal API list prices.

How people reacted

Numbers here are as of Sep 30 KST morning. The dominant reading was that subscription subsidies are winding down. After Tibo, OpenAI’s Codex lead, previewed the change the day before the keynote, an r/LocalLLaMA post titled “Looks like the era of subsidised compute is coming to an end” drew 1,037 upvotes, and The Decoder called the change a sign of a move toward pay-per-use pricing.

Trust was the other theme. In the Hacker News thread on Pro 500 (190 points, 218 comments), the longest subthread started from a comment questioning “hand-wavey usage limits on a 500$ subscription,” and another commenter wrote: “Can’t trust a company which can halve a subscription any moment they want.” r/codex’s “Dev Day L” (794 upvotes), a critical r/ChatGPT post (491) and an r/ChatGPTPro post warning that usage would be cut in half (314) followed the same line.

Defenders spoke up too. An r/codex comment saying pricing “now scales properly per dollar” drew 72 upvotes, and another user argued that a near-Astra model at a fifth of the cost means more work done per week.

What OpenAI has said

  • Tibo (Thibault Sottiaux) wrote on X before the keynote that the new calculation nets out at half the API-dollar value of the old Pro 200, and committed to not bringing back the five-hour limit. At the closing Q&A, Tibo urged thinking in “outcome per dollar” over token counts.
  • CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC: “When we launched our $200 SKU, people thought we’d lost our minds.” Friar added that customers who get good outcomes now buy more credits.
  • A spokesperson told The Register that you’ll later be able to pay a flat monthly fee to add dots or give a dot more speed or capacity.
  • Axios wrote that OpenAI is focusing at first on “high-end subscribers, mostly developers.”

Artificial Analysis partly backs the efficiency argument: GPT-6.1 Sol’s cost per task was under a quarter of Astra’s, though it used 10 to 30% more output tokens than GPT-6 Sol. SemiAnalysis’s June estimate also resurfaced: fully used, the old 20x Pro plan could consume up to about $14,000 a month of work at API prices. It’s an outside estimate, and that plan has since changed.

How fast Ultrafast uses a plan

Similar-looking multiples caused much of the confusion.

What Multiple Source
Token generation speed in Codex Up to 8x (300 tokens per second) DevDay recap
Token generation speed in the API Up to 6x DevDay recap
API price (GPT-6 Astra) 6x ($50 → $300 per 1M output tokens) API pricing
Included plan usage drawn 8x ChatGPT Learn
Purchased credits and Enterprise pay-as-you-go 6x ChatGPT Learn

The most shared calculation was “6x the price at 8x the speed, so 48x the drain,” from an r/OpenAI comment with 46 upvotes. The docs put the multiplier for included plan usage at 8x; 6x is the rate for credits and API prices. Likewise, the claim that Ultrafast turns the 25x plan into a 4.1x plan should read about 3.1x (25 ÷ 8). The 8x speed figure only covers token generation, so no single multiplication gives you drain per minute. On Pro 500, Ultrafast moves on to credits once the included allowance runs out, so check your automatic reload setting too.

What was running when limits vanished

The most shared case came from BridgeMind, a developer channel that livestreams coding. BridgeMind posted that one Astra Ultrafast prompt used 2% of the weekly limit in 2 minutes, then, half an hour later, that the entire Pro 500 weekly limit was gone in under 30 minutes. The attached screenshot shows reasoning effort set to xhigh. An r/codex comment with 120 upvotes said the stream ran 100 to 200 subagents per window across four windows, while other users who said they watched it replied that no subagents were requested, or that three or four sessions ran at once.

A separate r/codex post (311 upvotes) reported 17% of a weekly limit gone in 5 minutes while building a 3D model with Ultrafast and Astra at Ultra, its top reasoning level. In ChatGPT Work, Ultra can hand work to subagents on its own. OpenAI’s docs say each subagent does its own model and tool work, so it uses more tokens, and by default inherits the parent’s model and reasoning effort. Sam Altman said in the keynote that Ultrafast is worth it even at 6x the price.

Dots stay outside plan limits for a month

OpenAI’s release notes say that for the next month, dots usage won’t count toward Pro, Business and Enterprise allowances, with per-plan terms to follow. The announcement and the getting-started guide word the same month as “extended limits”, so OpenAI’s own pages differ. Conversations with your dot never count, while tasks your dot starts in Codex or Work count as usual. Tibo added on X on the morning of September 30 (KST) that work your dot does directly uses none of your plan usage and that the baseline will always be included. No per-plan terms have been published.

Which plan fits

With usage per dollar now equal, pick by weekly volume and whether you need Ultrafast.

How you work Plan Why
Mostly chat, occasional Codex or Work Plus ($20) Chat is unlimited (with abuse guardrails); Codex allows an estimated 15 to 160 GPT-6.1 Sol messages per five hours
Codex daily, often hitting Plus limits Pro 100 ($100) 5x Plus (pre-change figure), no five-hour limit, dots included
Codex all day, Pro 100 runs out late in the week Pro 200 ($200) 10x
Large parallel agent runs, or response speed matters Pro 500 ($500) 25x plus Ultrafast, which draws usage at 8x
Unattended automation such as CI API key OpenAI’s suggested setup for automation, billed at API prices
  • If you go over now and then, credits can cover it. They’re used only after your included allowance and last 12 months from purchase. If you go over every week, look at the next plan up first.
  • If you’re an existing Pro 200 subscriber, check your weekly usage now. If your busiest week stays under 50% of the 20x allowance, the same work fits in 10x after October 30, if the baseline and rates hold.
  • If you mainly want a dot, Pro 100 includes one (Tibo confirmed). Pro 500 can only be bought on the web at launch.

Ways to make usage last

  • Pick the model and reasoning effort first. GPT-6.1 Sol’s credit rates (50 per 1M input tokens, 250 per 1M output) are a fifth of GPT-6 Astra’s (250 and 1,250), and higher effort means more time and tokens.
  • Turn off Ultrafast and Fast for long runs nobody is watching. The multiplier (8x, or 2.5x for Fast) applies either way, and OpenAI says to use Ultrafast when speed justifies the cost.
  • Configure subagents deliberately. Through [agents] in config.toml or your prompt, you can give light work GPT-6 Luna or a lower effort. If you don’t need parallel work, pick a level below Ultra in Work.
  • Split planning from execution. OpenAI’s docs suggest GPT-6.1 Sol for demanding agents and GPT-6 Luna for narrow, repeatable work. On r/ChatGPTPro, one developer let GPT-6.1 Sol only plan while a local model wrote the code, cutting API spend by 77% at 6 to 7 times the run time. The author builds the tool used.
  • Keep context lean. OpenAI suggests trimming prompts and source material, keeping AGENTS.md small and turning off unused MCP servers. Cached input on GPT-6.1 Sol costs a twentieth of regular input.
  • Check often. Use /status in the Codex CLI and the usage dashboard. Apps connected through Sign in with ChatGPT draw from the same allowance, so set per-app weekly limits.

Where some people are looking instead

People planning to leave named two alternatives. One is Claude’s plans; an r/codex reply about canceling and moving to Claude drew 94 upvotes. The multiples are measured differently: Anthropic says its Max plans (from $100 a month) give 5x or 20x Pro’s usage per five-hour session with weekly limits on top, while OpenAI’s Pro plans currently have no five-hour limit. The other is paying per token for open-weight models such as DeepSeek. One Hacker News user reported 1.8 billion tokens in a week through DeepSeek’s API for $18.13, with 99.2% cache hits, while another said they spent over $100 in two to three days through a different provider.

What to keep in mind

  • Exact limits are not published. Pro’s weekly limits and their dollar value aren’t public, and Tibo’s “half” has no base figure.
  • The rumored return of five-hour limits is unconfirmed. An r/codex post claimed they would soon return to Pro 100 and Pro 200; a reply said the idea came from the Pro 500 description mentioning no five-hour limit. OpenAI’s email commits to not reintroducing the limit on Pro 200, and its docs say Pro plans “currently” have none.
  • The cutoff isn’t specified. The help page doesn’t give the eligibility cutoff date or the time zone for October 29.
  • GPT-6.1 Sol Ultrafast hasn’t shipped. OpenAI said “in the coming days,” and its usage multiplier isn’t published.
  • Launch-day numbers came from mixed conditions. OpenAI reset everyone’s usage at the end of the keynote.

And in endue

endue plans include a weekly LLM usage allowance measured in credits, and our pricing page sets 1 credit at US$1. The usage dashboard shows how much of your allowance is left, broken down by model and agent, and typing /usage in a conversation shows that conversation’s tokens and credits.

Sources

OpenAI

Press and analysis

Community (as of Sep 30 KST morning)

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