Not getting enough out of that ChatGPT Business subscription? OpenAI is hoping you’ll take it up on a new “premium” Business tier seat that’s up to $100 more a month for some added capacity and higher usage limits. Sam Altman’s AI outfit announced ChatGPT Business Premium seats on Monday, describing the new offering as an option for Business-tier customers who feel they’re chafing under the old Business limitations.
Business Premium seats, which can be combined with standard Business seats, get five times more usage than Standard seats, and are exempt from the five-hour-per-day usage limit on advanced features. Those enhanced limits come at a price, though. For reference, standard Business tier seats are $25 a month if paid per month, or $20 per month if billed annually.
Premium Business seats, on the other hand, are $125/month or $100 if billed annually. (Larger orgs have their own "call us for pricing" Enterprise tier with all the bells and whistles like SLAs and extra security and access controls.) As for what Premium seats will actually get you, that varies per model and task type.
According to a help page for Business models and limits, which doesn’t yet include GPT 5. 6 usage limits, GPT 5. 5 Instant use is “virtually unlimited” for Business seats.
GPT 5. 5 Thinking and Pro are limited to 3,000 requests per week and 15 requests per month, respectively. As noted above, Premium seats get 5x that limit.
Beyond that, even Premium seats will have to eat into ChatGPT credits, the pay-as-you-go-not-quite-a-token system OpenAI uses to charge for advanced features. OpenAI is running a promotion as part of the launch of Premium Business seats to provide some extra credits for customers who buy into the waitlist for the new offering, with $100 in workspace service credits available for each qualifying Premium seat added to a Business workspace, up to 5 seats.
Only the first 10,000 customers to sign up for the Premium waitlist will get those credits, however, so if you’re so inclined, you’d better move fast. Or you could spin up an open-weight model instead Introducing a new, considerably more expensive tokenmaxxing option for smaller business customers at a time when frontier AI labs are being hammered for pushing up prices and facing increased competition from Chinese open-weight models is quite a gamble.
Chinese open weights AI models are rapidly becoming just as capable as their closed-source, AI-as-a-service American counterparts, raising the question of why companies with a strategy for heavy AI consumption would be willing to pay hundreds of dollars a month for seat-plus-usage fees when an open-weight model running in a colocation DC or on-prem could deliver similar results.
Sure, the hardware isn’t cheap, but the model is free and so is using it, aside from what it costs to keep the server lights blinking. Beyond that, AI returns are still a fuzzy, nebulous thing, too. Plenty of AI investments have yet to pay off; asking customers to pay $100 more a month for increased usage limits is a big ask.
Nonetheless, OpenAI is confident that Business Premium seats will be a hot commodity. The new offering, OpenAI claimed to us in an email, was introduced because customers were asking for increased usage limits for deeper work on the Business tier. For them, the company expects the price point to be perfectly acceptable, we’re told.
Originally published at theregister.com
