OpenAI appears to be preparing a new subscription tier called ChatGPT Pro Lite, priced at $100 per month. The discovery was made by Tibor Blaho, a Vienna-based engineer known for uncovering unreleased ChatGPT features months before they went live. The new plan would slot between the current Plus tier at $20 per month and the full Pro subscription at $200, filling a notable gap in OpenAI’s consumer pricing ladder.
OpenAI currently offers Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Team, Business, and Enterprise plans. The jump from $20 to $200 has long been criticized as too steep, leaving power users who need more than Plus provides but cannot justify the Pro price tag without a middle option. Pro Lite at $100 could serve freelancers, researchers, and developers who hit Plus rate limits regularly but do not need the unlimited access that Pro delivers. It may also be designed to accommodate Codex usage, which has become a core part of the ChatGPT experience for paid users following the desktop app launch.
The new ChatGPT Pro Lite plan costs $100 per month (the description on the checkout page is likely still a work in progress) https://t.co/TDH4Ql0gXb pic.twitter.com/Q1psZyJZDA
— Tibor Blaho (@btibor91) February 21, 2026
The timing is worth noting. OpenAI recently hired Peter Steinberger, creator of the viral open-source agent framework OpenClaw, with Sam Altman stating the future will be “extremely multi-agent.” If OpenAI plans to offer always-on agentic capabilities within ChatGPT, whether built on OpenClaw’s foundations or developed in-house, the compute costs for persistent, background-running agents would be substantially higher than standard chat sessions. A $100 tier could serve as the entry point for these compute-heavy features, effectively creating a cutoff where certain capabilities are unavailable to Plus subscribers.
Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents. He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this will quickly become core to our…
— Sam Altman (@sama) February 15, 2026
No release date has been confirmed, and the exact feature set remains unclear. However, given Blaho’s consistent accuracy in previous discoveries and OpenAI’s pattern of rapid shipping, a public announcement could come in the near term. The move would also put competitive pressure on Anthropic and Google, neither of which currently offers an equivalent mid-tier individual plan at this price point.
