OpenAI is splitting ChatGPT Business into a two-tier system, and the message to power users is clear: pay up or stay throttled. The company just introduced a Premium seat that costs $125 per user monthly—or $100 if you commit to an annual plan. That’s a 5x price hike over the $25 Standard seat, and in exchange, OpenAI removes the five-hour usage cap that’s been the bane of heavy users and boosts capacity fivefold with predictable weekly resets.
The move answers what OpenAI says has been its top request from business customers: a plan for teammates who treat ChatGPT not as a novelty but as a core tool for building campaigns, analyzing inventory, or shipping code. The pitch is that work “should never have to stop,” and Premium is designed so power users—developers leaning on Codex, marketers spinning up full campaigns from customer data, business owners turning reports into operating plans—never hit a wall mid-project.
What’s interesting structurally is the flexibility. Workspace owners can mix Standard and Premium seats inside the same secure environment, upgrading or reassigning licenses as projects demand. It’s a pragmatic nod to the reality that most teams aren’t uniformly AI-intensive. One sales rep might be fine with Standard; your lead developer needs the fire hose. OpenAI also dangles a limited-time carrot: the first 10,000 eligible workspaces get $100 in credits (2,500 credits) per Premium seat added, capped at five seats, with some getting early access.
This tiered model mirrors what we’ve seen across SaaS for years—think Slack’s free vs. paid, or GitHub’s team vs. enterprise—but applied to a foundation model’s consumption economics. It’s a bet that companies will stomach a per-seat price north of Microsoft 365 E5 if the productivity gain is real. The question OpenAI hasn’t answered is whether 5x capacity actually feels like “unlimited” for the kinds of marathon sessions Premium is meant to unlock, or if it just moves the goalpost. For now, the promotion runs through August 20, and workspace owners need to join the waitlist with their account email to qualify.
