Two AI price launches last week. Only one changes your bill.

Hi Reader,

Two AI price launches landed last week. One changes what your team should pay. The other mostly changes the headline.

OpenAI, September 29 (DevDay): ChatGPT Pro now comes in three sizes: $100, $200 and $500 a month. OpenAI's Codex pricing page says Pro plans currently have no five-hour limit. Plus still has one, roughly 15 to 150 Codex messages every five hours on GPT-6 Sol, depending on the task.

The $200 tier, which stopped taking new sign-ups on September 10, is open again. New subscribers get a smaller allowance than the people already on it. And GPT-5.5 leaves Codex on October 14, so if a workflow on your team is pinned to it, move it before then.

Anthropic, September 28: Claude Sonnet 5.5 "costs up to 30% less for most work." I read the price sheet line by line. Sonnet 5.5 is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output. That's exactly what Sonnet 5 cost.

So the 30% is a claim that the new model uses fewer tokens for the same job. It might be true on your work. It isn't a price cut, and only your bill can confirm it.

Here's why a manager should care. The $100 tier used to be the "one person keeps hitting the limit" fix. Now there are three tiers above Plus, and the easy move when someone complains is to upgrade the whole team. That's how a $20 seat quietly becomes a $100 seat, times everyone.

This week's AI tip: the 5-minute limit check (before anyone upgrades)

Send your team this in Slack or Teams:

Quick one: how many days last week did ChatGPT or Claude stop you with a usage limit? Reply 0, 1-2, or 3+. And what were you doing when it happened?

Then sort the replies with this rule:

0: keep the plan. Nothing to buy.
1-2 days: don't upgrade the seat. Change how that person works first: batch the big jobs, and do the thinking in chat before asking for files or code. On ChatGPT Plus you can buy extra Codex credits for a heavy week without changing plans.
3+ days: upgrade that one person, not the team. Start at $100. Nobody needs $500 unless their coding sessions are what's holding up paid work.

The "what were you doing" answers are the useful part. If three people hit the cap rebuilding the same deck, that's a training fix, not a billing one.

I keep every plan's current price and limit on one sheet, and it emails you when a vendor moves a number: the AI stack cost sheet.

Reply with your team's split, something like "six 0s, two 1-2s, one 3+," and I'll tell you what I'd buy.

And if you'd rather have your team's ChatGPT plan set up right the first time, seats, rules and all, here's how that install works.

Talk soon,
Justin

justinmckelvey.com · LinkedIn · X · Blog

Justin McKelvey · Austin, TX

Justin McKelvey | Fractional CTO & AI Consultant

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