OpenAI has temporarily halted new sign-ups for its $200-per-month Pro plan, citing infrastructure strain driven by demand for Astra, the company's newest model2,4.
Tibo, OpenAI's product leader for core products including Codex and ChatGPT, announced the pause on X on September 10. "To make sure our current users have an incredible experience and continued access to Astra, we are going to pause subscriptions to our $200 Pro plan," he wrote. "These put the most strain on our systems and we wanted to take the smallest step that allows us to continue giving the broadest access possible".
The move followed a public warning on September 9, when Tibo wrote that "demand for Astra is really unprecedented" and that the company was "pulling all the levers possible to sustain the demand". He noted at the time that he had "not seen anything like it" despite OpenAI having gone through steep growth before, and that the company might have to pause new Pro subscriptions if conditions persisted.
Existing Pro accounts are unaffected by the freeze, and OpenAI's other tiers, including the API, the Go plan, and the Plus plan, remain open to new subscribers.
Astra launched on September 3 and has been rolling out across OpenAI's plans, including Pro. OpenAI raised usage limits for Codex users as recently as last month, which TechCrunch noted suggests the infrastructure strain is a recent development.
OpenAI has not disclosed how long the Pro sign-up freeze will last or how many users were subscribing daily.
ANALYSIS Freezing new subscriptions to the highest-revenue consumer tier is an unusual step that prioritizes service quality for existing users over near-term subscription growth. The decision to keep the API and lower-cost plans open narrows the impact to the most compute-intensive consumer offering.