“There’s no world in which pricing doesn’t significantly evolve when the technology is changing this quickly,” Turley told Altimeter Partner Apoorv Agrawal on the “Bg2 Pod” podcast on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Turley said its large language model was initially launched as a temporary demo<\/a> that OpenAI planned to shut down after a month. But after it went viral and users loved it, he said, the company quickly realized it had a real product on its hands.<\/p>\n Subscriptions, he said, were introduced to manage overwhelming demand<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n Every time Thibault publishes a story, you’ll get an alert straight to your inbox!\n <\/p>\n \n Stay connected to Thibault and get more of their work as it publishes.\n <\/p>\n ChatGPT offers a free version with usage limits. As well as paid plans like Plus for $20<\/a> a month with higher usage limits, and Pro, which costs $200<\/a> a month, and unlocks faster performance and unlimited prompts.<\/p>\n “We stumbled into subscriptions,” Turley said, describing the model as an “accidental” solution to capacity constraints.<\/p>\n AI is breaking pricing models<\/p>\n Now, as AI capabilities rapidly improve \u2014 and become more compute-intensive \u2014 the subscription model is under pressure.<\/p>\n “It’s possible that in the current era, having an unlimited plan is like having an unlimited electricity plan,” Turley said. “It just doesn’t make sense.”<\/p>\n The shift echoes comments from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said last week that AI could be sold like electricity<\/a> \u2014 metered by usage \u2014 as demand for the technology surges. Major tech companies are set to spend hundreds of billions of dollars this year on compute to meet the soaring demand for AI.<\/p>\n As a result, OpenAI is exploring how to better align pricing with usage while still expanding access.<\/p>\n Turley said the company’s “north star is access,” and pointed to experiments like advertising<\/a> as one way to reach users who may not be able to pay for subscriptions.<\/p>\n “Obviously I want to be really thoughtful about the way that we evolve our plans,” Turley said, but would be “incredibly surprised if it didn’t change, given the magnitude and profoundness of the technical breakthroughs<\/a> that we’ve had and the product breakthroughs that follow.”<\/p>\n The industry is rethinking pricing<\/p>\n The move at OpenAI echoes a wider industry rethink.<\/p>\n In an episode of the “Dwarkesh Podcast” published last November, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella said the company is already talking about charging “per agent<\/a>” rather than per user as AI becomes a coworker.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, cloud and model providers like Anthropic and Google price many services on a pay-as-you-go, per-token basis.<\/p>\n![\"Thibault\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/64da03c51f51cc001968b554.jpeg\")
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