Like most people I was as little confused when OpenAI announced a $200 (£157, AU$313) ChatGPT Pro tier since its previous paid-for subscription was a comparatively small $20 (£16 AU$30) a month for ChatGPT Plus. You can of course, continue to use ChatGPT for free on the free tier.
$200 was a big jump up and at the time of announcement because it offered only modest advantages over ChatGPT Plus. For your $200 you got access to o1 pro mode, which is a version of the latest o1 LLM from OpenAI that uses more compute to think harder and provide better answers. To me, $200 seems like a lot of extra cash for harder thinking.
Sure, if you’re involved in research-level activities, or need what OpenAI describes as the “more reliably accurate and comprehensive responses, especially in areas like data science, programming, and case law analysis”, then maybe you do need it. To me it seems like that's such a small subset of the ChatGPT user base that it felt that ChatGPT Pro was simply being used a price anchor. A price anchor is essentially a marketing device designed to make your other pricing levels look competitive. Compared to a $200 ChatGPT Pro subscription, a $20 ChatGPT Plus subscription suddenly looks like very good value.
