OpenAI Is Building a $500 per Month ChatGPT Pro Max Plan, Leaks Suggest

OpenAI is quietly testing a new ChatGPT subscription tier called Pro Max that would cost $500 a month, according to code references and screenshots that started circulating this week. That’s 25 times the price of the $20 ChatGPT Plus plan, and more than double the $200 Pro tier OpenAI launched back in December 2024.

Independent researcher Tibor Blaho was one of the first who spotted the changes in a series of hidden logs.

Leak tracker TestingCatalog followed with another confirmation. He didn’t have a price yet. That came a bit later when a user responded with a screenshot of the logs showing a price of $500 per month.

Chetaslua, one of the most popular accounts in the AI leaks scene, followed up with a screenshot of the tier appearing inside ChatGPT’s own interface, name and all. “A new ChatGPT Pro Max plan has been spotted in development,” the account wrote, floating a guess as high as $2,000 a month before the real number surfaced. It’s not confirmed whether the UI is a leak or a render, but the content matched the rumors.

OpenAI’s DevDay conference lands September 29, and TestingCatalog predicted the company would “likely hear more about it already very soon.”

It’s not just X users supplying the leaks either. A Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT surfaced the same $500 price tag independently, and code strings with “chatgptpromax” identifier match what the leakers described.

So what does $500 actually buy? Not more chats. Based on Chetaslua’s video, the only listed change between Pro and Pro Max is speed on two of OpenAI’s agent products: Work, which handles multi-step research and writing tasks, and Codex, OpenAI’s tool that writes and debugs software code on its own over long stretches of time.

Chetaslua flagged something odd about the math, though. The plan is rumored to lean on Cerebras as its inference provider, a chipmaker that builds oversized “wafer-scale” processors—single chips roughly the size of a dinner plate, built to move data faster than the smaller chips Nvidia sells. Inference is the term for the actual moment an AI model generates an answer, as opposed to the earlier process of training it.

Cerebras has pitched its hardware as 21 times faster than Nvidia’s B200 chips at a third of the cost, which raises the question of why a speed boost from cheaper, faster hardware would carry a $300 premium over the existing Pro plan.

Other reported perks include maximum memory allocation and 100GB of file storage, according to screenshots reviewed by outlets tracking the leak.

OpenAI hasn’t said a word about Pro Max publicly, and none of this is confirmed until the company says so. But the timing lines up: DevDay, OpenAI’s annual event for developers and power users, is four days away, and new pricing tiers are exactly the kind of thing OpenAI has used the stage to unveil before.

A $500 tier would also land far outside the pricing fight already underway among rivals. Anthropic’s top Claude Max plan runs $100 to $200 a month, and Google cut its competing AI Ultra plan from $250 down to $100 a month back in May.