OpenAI has broken the glass ceiling. Their Pro plan is a jump to the ultra-premium that makes all the sense in the world

The ChatGPT Pro plan and its $200 per month caught us by surprise, but only halfway. We already knew that OpenAI was going to need something really big by 2025 if it did not want to complicate the future by being a machine that lost more money than it could hope to raise.

The half that did surprise was its price, higher than any cabal could set. Once digested, it’s not that big of a deal: it may seem exorbitant, but the annualized $2,400 is aimed at a professional audience that is clear that the jump compared to the Plus plan ($240 per year) will skyrocket their productivity, or their return.

In perspective. Premium professional software, depending on its category and what it includes, usually has high prices. And it is against them that ChatGPT Pro must be compared. Some examples:

• Bloomberg Terminal: about $25,000 a year.
• Adobe Creative Cloud: $660 per year.
• Salesforce Enterprise: $300 per user per month.
• AutoCAD: $2,030 per year.
• MatLab: $860 per year.
• Tableau Creator: $115 per user per month.

For professionals with a certain income threshold, this new plan may be more than justified. For example, for a developer who earns $150,000 a year (a lot in these latitudes, not too much in others), a saving of 3 or 4 hours a month thanks to ChatGPT Pro would already serve to justify the investment.

In the spotlight. There are some fields of professionals to whom the new ChatGPT Pro seems to be aimed, as they are guilds that are somewhat more inclined to take advantage of the unlimited capabilities of O1, its most advanced model with reasoning capabilities.

• Developers, for optimizing code, writing from simple prompts, or resolving complex errors.
• Lawyers, to do quick analysis of complex legal cases.
• Data scientists, for advanced analysis and debugging of ML models.
• Consultants, for data analysis and report generation.
• Traders algorithmic, for the optimization of strategies trading.
• Medical researchers, in fact OpenAI has awarded ten scholarships to researchers.

Between the lines. The operating cost of ChatGPT –700,000 dollars a day and rising– suggests something: perhaps not even $200 a month for Pro users can cover costs, especially for more intensive users.

With 10 million subscribers in its Plus plan ($20 per month), OpenAI consolidates its three-tier strategy: free for casual or basic users, Plus for regular or intensive users, and Pro for very high-demand users who need maximum performance.

Go deeper. This new OpenAI pricing strategy illuminates a perhaps uncomfortable, but undeniable reality: advanced AI can multiply the productivity of certain professionals. And for many of them, the return exceeds the necessary investment, although at first it seems too high. And of course, OpenAI wants to capture a portion of that value.

For a developer charging $100 per hour, if ChatGPT Pro cuts your development time in half debugging of a complex problem, the return is almost immediate.

The precedent. The one mentioned Bloomberg Terminalwhich completely changed the trading by giving instant and real-time access to financial data when it was very complex to obtain it.

Today, ChatGPT Pro promises to make access to advanced computing capacity more accessible: for $200 a month it offers the capacity that until recently could only be offered by a very very expensive infrastructure, inaccessible to many companies. Let’s not even talk about independent professionals.

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Featured image | Xataka with Midjourney