WithOpenAI's new premium-priced monthly Pro plan, the generative AI vendor looks to be testing the market to see how much users are willing to pay for advanced AI models.
ChatGPT Pro, unveiled Thursday, provides access to some of the vendor's top large language models (LLMs), plus the Advanced Voice and new o1 pro mode reasoning models, for $200 per user per month.
By comparison, ChatGPT Plus, with limited access to o1 and o1-mini, costs $20 per month. Google Gemini Business is $20 a month, and Gemini Enterprise is $30 a month, both with an annual commitment.
The pricing takes the affordability away from a lot of casual users, leaving only the serious users.
Andy ThuraiAnalyst, Constellation Research
"The first thing that jumped out at me is the eye-popping price," said Andy Thurai, an analyst at Constellation Research. "The pricing takes the affordability away from a lot of casual users, leaving only the serious users."
High price signals revenue loss
OpenAI, which sparked the GenAI boom by releasing the original ChatGPT just over two years ago, appears to be going after revenue, a persistent problem for GenAI vendors that have spent billions of dollars creating LLMs.
ChatGPT Pro's pricing "also proves the point that many of these LLM providers are losing money," Thurai continued. "This shows that ChatGPT and other LLM-based models are done with proof-of-concept and proof-of-value experimentation and moved on to production levels at many enterprises."
Thurai noted, however, that the Pro subscription allows customers to use a group of models, not just a single model. That includes o1 pro mode, which he called "their reasoning mode on steroids."
Power mode
The o1 pro mode is a version of OpenAI's o1 LLM -- touted as the vendor's most intelligent model -- released in preview in September and general availability this week. The Pro mode is powered by more compute and designed to answer more complex problems.
"At $2,400 a year, if it improves the productivity of a $200,000-per-year knowledge worker, that's still a win," said Kashyap Kompella, analyst and CEO at RPA2AI Research. "And the small agency or independent contractor power user … won't mind paying that extra amount."
Also, the mostly unlimited usage plan should appeal to power users, Kompella added.
OpenAI added a caveat to the pricing: that usage must be reasonable and comply with the vendor's policies against automatically extracting data, sharing account credentials and reselling access to third parties.
Some users will absorb the premium price, but the ChatGPT Pro paradigm could lead to higher prices for other OpenAI products and those from other GenAI vendors, Kompella said.
"This is a signal that the AI providers are now being forced to turn attention to profitability, not just technology," he added. "That had to happen at some point."
GenAI safety, performance
While OpenAI appears to target both advanced individual users and enterprises with the ChatGPT Pro subscription -- with the o1 pro mode in particular -- the vendor hasn't paid much attention to guarding against the risks of GenAI technology, Thurai said.
"I don't see many safety, security, privacy, responsibility or risk mitigation features or guardrails included in this model currently," he said. "While OpenAI can play catchup, it still lags behind other players in those areas."
At the same time, Thurai said, OpenAI models lead in most performance categories, but competitors such as Anthropic and others will inevitably match OpenAI.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Shaun Sutner is senior news director for TechTarget Editorial's information management team, driving coverage of artificial intelligence, unified communications, analytics and data management technologies. He is a veteran journalist with more than 30 years of news experience.
