OpenAI Wants Business Customers to Pay $125 a Month for More ChatGPT Access
A new 'Business Premium' seat tier costs up to five times the price of a standard seat. Here is what you actually get, and whether it is worth it.
Key points
- OpenAI launched ChatGPT Business Premium seats on Monday, priced at $125 per month (or $100 per month billed annually).
- Premium seats offer five times the usage limits of standard Business seats, which cost $25 per month.
- Customers who join the waitlist can receive up to $100 in service credits per Premium seat added, for a maximum of five seats.
- Only the first 10,000 customers to sign up for the waitlist qualify for those credits.
- Rival AI models from Chinese developers, many available free to download, are putting pressure on OpenAI's pricing strategy.
OpenAI already sells a Business plan aimed at companies that want to use ChatGPT across a team. Standard seats cost $25 a month, or $20 a month if you pay for a full year upfront. The new Business Premium seats sit above that, at $125 a month (or $100 annually), and are designed for employees who keep hitting usage caps.
What does the extra money actually buy?
Premium seats give you five times the weekly or monthly request limits of a standard Business seat, and they remove the five-hour daily cap on advanced features. For context, a standard Business seat is currently limited to 3,000 requests per week on GPT-5.5 Thinking, OpenAI's more deliberate reasoning model, and just 15 requests per month on GPT-5.5 Pro, its most capable option. Premium seats multiply those ceilings by five.
Even so, heavy users will eventually burn through those limits. Once they do, they fall back on ChatGPT credits, OpenAI's pay-as-you-go system for charging extra when you exceed your plan's included usage. Credits work a bit like a prepaid meter: you buy a bundle and the system draws it down as you use advanced features.
As a launch promotion, OpenAI is offering $100 in workspace service credits for each Premium seat added, up to five seats per account. The catch: only the first 10,000 customers on the waitlist qualify.
Is this a good deal for small businesses?
That depends on whether your team genuinely maxes out the standard plan every week. If your staff are occasional ChatGPT users, the standard $25 seat covers most needs. If you have a handful of heavy users, say a marketing team running dozens of AI drafts a day, the increased limits could justify the jump.
But there is an honest caveat worth stating. As first reported by The Register AI, Chinese AI developers are releasing open-weight models, meaning AI software whose code and underlying data are published freely for anyone to download and run. Several of these models now match the quality of paid services like ChatGPT on many common tasks. A business with the technical know-how to run one of these models on its own servers would pay for the hardware but nothing for the software itself.
For most small business owners, running your own AI server is not realistic today. But the competitive pressure from free alternatives is real, and it does make a $125-per-month-per-seat commitment worth scrutinising carefully.
What should you do before signing up?
Check your team's actual usage first. OpenAI's admin dashboard shows how many requests each user makes. If nobody is hitting the standard limits, the Premium tier is money you do not need to spend.
If a few power users are genuinely blocked by the caps, adding Premium seats only for those individuals is an option: OpenAI allows you to mix standard and Premium seats in the same account.
The honest takeaway: audit your ChatGPT usage data before upgrading anything.
