Vibe coders who hit their ChatGPT usage limits too quickly on OpenAI's $20-a-month Plus plan no longer have to choose between waiting for a reset or splurging on a $200-a-month upgrade. The company on Thursday said it would introduce a new Pro plan, at $100 a month, that comes with higher limits in the increasingly popular Codex coding app.

AI coding tools have exploded in popularity in the past several months, with Anthropic's Claude Code generating viral headlines at the end of 2025 and OpenAI's Codex seeing a boom in usage so far this year. OpenAI said Codex usage has risen more than 70% month-over-month.

The problem is that having AI plan and write code for an app or tool uses a lot more tokens -- the basic unit of AI generation -- than just asking it to chat.

Read more: OpenAI Plans to Combine Its AI Tools in a Desktop 'Superapp'

OpenAI said in its announcement that the purpose of the new, cheaper Pro plan is to create a middle ground for those who want more time to code and create without paying 10 times the cost of the Plus plan. 

The new tier includes Codex usage limits five times higher than the Plus plan and access to all the other features of the existing $200-a-month Pro plan, including the ChatGPT Pro model. It also covers unlimited access to Instant and Thinking models. 

The $200-a-month Pro plan includes usage limits 20 times higher than those of the Plus plan.

Anthropic offers similar pricing for its Claude AI subscriptions. Claude Max 5x offers five times the capacity of the $20-a-month plan for $100 a month, and Claude Max 20x offers 20 times the capacity for $200 a month.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, last year alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)