OpenAI is changing how use of ChatGPT is counted for people on its Plus, Pro and Business plans. Starting in December, its help pages say, the usage allowance on those plans will be shared across ChatGPT and Codex, OpenAI's coding tool, as the company brings the abilities of ChatGPT Work into the main ChatGPT experience. Work is the part of ChatGPT that takes on a whole task for you, such as making a deck, an analysis or a file, and hands it back for you to review.
Today, Work, Codex and some other features, such as ChatGPT for Word, already share one allowance on the plans that include them. Message limits for GPT-6 Pro, the chat version of Astra, which OpenAI calls its most capable model, offered on some Pro, Business and Enterprise plans but not Plus, are counted separately. From December, chats will draw on the shared allowance too, with one exception: OpenAI says Instant chat will not draw from it. Use will be measured by how much information the AI reads and writes, from your messages and files to its replies, and OpenAI says more advanced models and complex tasks generally use more of it.
OpenAI says it expects most users won't need to wait for their usage to reset more often than they do now. The Usage page under Settings, which already tracks Work and Codex, will show the combined remaining usage and reset times. When subscribers run out, they can wait for the reset, move to a bigger plan or buy credits, as Work and Codex users already can, though credits work only for some features.
Plus costs $20 a month, and Pro comes in plans at $100, $200 and $500 a month. The December change follows a reversal on Pro on Oct. 29. OpenAI says Pro 100 and Pro 500 now include twice their previous Work and Codex allowance, and Business Premium plans also get more Work and Codex usage. On Pro 200, where some subscribers had a smaller Work and Codex allowance than others, OpenAI has canceled a reduction it announced in a Sept. 29 email, and the smaller allowance has doubled, so every Pro 200 subscriber now gets the same one. OpenAI says a bigger allowance does not guarantee twice as many finished tasks. Plus subscribers get no increase.
OpenAI has not said exactly when in December the change starts, how much of the shared allowance an ordinary chat with one of its stronger models will use, what happens to the separate GPT-6 Pro message limits, or whether any plan's allowance will grow when chats join it.