Leak: OpenAI's Rumored ChatGPT Pro Max Would Cost $500 a Month, $600 With VAT

TL;DR

Leak tracker TestingCatalog reports that OpenAI is developing a new ChatGPT subscription tier called Pro Max, priced at $500 a month, or $600 a month with VAT. If real, it would sit above the $200 Pro plan, the current top of ChatGPT's consumer ladder. The tracker's line carries one leaked feature phrase with the number — "Fastest Work and Codex" — and its own guess that the tier is "potentially powered by Cerebras infrastructure." OpenAI has confirmed nothing, the usage limits behind the phrase are unstated, and there is no launch date. What is worth discussing is the price signal itself, and what it says about where OpenAI thinks the ceiling on an AI subscription now sits.

What the leak actually says

Per the report, the tier surfaced in unreleased ChatGPT subscription references, and the claim made the rounds via exact.news. The alleged facts fit in one line: the name "Pro Max," a $500 monthly price, and a $600 tax-inclusive figure. The report itself flags that anything beyond the price, such as what the tier would include, is unconfirmed.

So the honest framing is narrow. This is not a launch, an announcement, or a filing. It is a price tag spotted in code that ships to nobody yet. Single-source app-reference leaks have a mixed track record: sometimes they presage a product, sometimes they are abandoned experiments or internal placeholders that never see daylight.

Where it would sit

$500 is 2.5 times the $200 Pro plan (our math), which is the top consumer rung today. And that rung has been under visible strain: as we covered earlier this month, OpenAI paused new sign-ups for the $200 tier, with its product lead calling demand unprecedented and saying that plan strains the company's systems the most. Existing subscribers kept renewing; the door for new ones closed.

That is the interesting tension in this rumor. The top rung is closed for capacity reasons, and the leak says the fix under consideration is a rung above it at 2.5 times the price.

The read: pricing as rationing (analysis, ours)

Everything from here down is our interpretation, not reporting. A price is not a product, but it is a confession.

If the leak is accurate, the cheap and plausible reading is that OpenAI has a cohort of users whose consumption dwarfs what any flat consumer price can absorb, and its current tools for managing them are blunt: pause the plan, tighten the limits, eat the cost. A $500 tier is a finer instrument. It lets the heaviest users self-select into paying closer to their marginal cost, without repricing the mainstream tiers everyone else buys. It is the buffet adding a table by the kitchen with its own menu: the fix for the people eating the most was never more food, it was a price that admits what they consume.

There is also a market-sizing claim embedded in $500. A price like that is not aimed at hobbyists; it is aimed at people who can expense it, running heavy agent workloads where headroom is the bottleneck. OpenAI would be betting there are enough of those users to matter. Whether that bet is right is exactly what nobody outside knows.

Note what the price does not tell you: what the tier contains. When OpenAI last split its Pro plan into two rungs, both unlocked the same models and the difference was usage headroom, as our coverage noted at the time. A Pro Max could be more headroom, faster lanes, or a badge. Treating any specific feature as settled would be inventing a product the leak does not describe.

The skeptic's checklist

Four things keep this firmly in rumor territory. One source: everything traces back to a single tracker's report, with no confirmation from OpenAI. Provenance: unreleased subscription references are drafts by definition, and drafts get renamed, renumbered, and scrapped. Thin features: beyond the four-word "Fastest Work and Codex" wording, the leak says nothing about what the tier actually includes — no usage limits, no model names (the Cerebras note is the tracker's own speculation, not leaked text). No date: nothing says this ships at all, let alone when.

None of that makes it wrong. It makes it a directional signal, not a fact you can plan around.

What a builder does with this

Almost nothing, and that is the point. Do not budget around a tier that may not exist. If you are a heavy ChatGPT user chafing at limits, the actionable news is still the existing pause on the $200 plan: today's constraint is capacity, not the number of rungs. Watch OpenAI's own channels for anything official, and treat tracker reports like weather radar: they tell you something is out there, not whether it will rain on your roadmap.

If Pro Max does land at $500, the questions that matter are the ones the leak cannot answer: what it includes, whether the headroom is worth 2.5 times Pro, and whether the whale tier stays open or "sells out" like the rung below it.

Key Takeaways

• TestingCatalog reports OpenAI is developing a ChatGPT Pro Max tier at $500 a month, $600 with VAT, above the $200 Pro plan.
• It is a single-source rumor from unreleased app references: one leaked feature phrase ("Fastest Work and Codex"), no OpenAI confirmation, no usage limits, no launch date.
• $500 would be 2.5 times the $200 Pro plan (our math), the rung OpenAI paused for new sign-ups earlier this month.
• Analysis: a tier above a capacity-paused plan reads like price-based rationing for the heaviest users, not a mainstream reprice.
• Treat it as a directional signal about where subscription ceilings are heading, not as product news to plan around.

Sources: TestingCatalog: OpenAI prepares new $500/month Pro Max plan for ChatGPT, exact.news, OpenAI, AI Bacon: OpenAI stopped selling its $200 plan