Business Models and Pricing

In December 2024 OpenAI launched ChatGPT Pro at $200 a month, ten times the $20 price of ChatGPT Plus, which had set the consumer anchor for the whole industry in February 2023. Pro offered unlimited or high limits on OpenAI's best models. In January 2025 Sam Altman said on social media that OpenAI was losing money on Pro because people used it more than the company had expected (company statement). The most expensive consumer plan in the market was unprofitable within weeks, because the customers who choose a $200 plan are exactly the ones who use it most.

Other labs followed with the same structure and met the same problem. Anthropic introduced Claude Max at $100 and $200 a month in April 2025 and added weekly limits for heavy Claude Code users from August; Google launched AI Ultra at ~$250 in May 2025 and xAI SuperGrok Heavy at ~$300 in July (company announcements). OpenAI, meanwhile, looked for revenue that did not depend on subscriptions at all. It launched Instant Checkout with merchants in September 2025, built with Stripe, and began showing ads to users of its free and low-priced tiers in February 2026; by August 2026 it claimed an advertising run rate of about $1 billion (company claim). On the figures reported in February 2026, about 900 million weekly users and about 50 million paying subscribers, roughly 5–6% of ChatGPT's users paid anything.

This chapter is about how AI companies charge, and why the choice of price unit decides who carries the cost of compute, who keeps the gains when models get cheaper and whether success grows revenue or shrinks it.