Sam Altman says ChatGPT Pro is losing money

Charging $200 a month sounds like an easy way to print cash, but OpenAI just ran into the age-old buffet problem: heavy eaters will always eat you out of house and home.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted on Sunday that the company is currently losing money on its premium ChatGPT Pro subscription. The reason is simple. People are using it way more than the company ever anticipated.

Pricing by gut feeling

Altman wrote on X that he personally picked the $200 price tag, genuinely thinking it would turn a profit.

Launched late last year, ChatGPT Pro is aimed at serious power users. It offers access to the advanced o1 pro mode reasoning model and lifts rate limits on tools like the Sora video generator. While a $2,400 annual bill raised eyebrows at launch, the users who actually paid up are pushing the system to its absolute limits, and OpenAI is footing the bill.

This is not the first time OpenAI skipped basic market research. In a recent Bloomberg interview, Altman revealed that the original $20 ChatGPT Plus plan was just as arbitrary. Back in late 2022 or early 2023, the team simply tested $20 and $42. Users balked at $42, embraced $20, and OpenAI rolled with it without hiring anyone to conduct a formal pricing study.

The burn rate problem

Despite raising roughly $20 billion since its launch, OpenAI remains deeply unprofitable.

Last year, the company reportedly projected a $5 billion loss on $3.7 billion in revenue. Massive compute bills, staffing, and office rents continue to chew through cash, with ChatGPT previously estimated to cost $700,000 per day just to run.

OpenAI is currently restructuring to bring in fresh investment, admitting it needs far more capital than previously thought. While internal forecasts project $11.6 billion in revenue this year and an eye-popping $100 billion by 2029, survival requires plugging the leaks. Reports suggest price hikes are under consideration across multiple subscription tiers, and Altman hinted that usage-based pricing might be inevitable.

Why it matters

Altman's confession exposes the fundamental flaw of flat-rate subscriptions in the reasoning era. Traditional chatbots gave snappy, cheap answers. Reasoning models like o1 pro think through complex chains of thought, chewing through massive amounts of compute on every single prompt. Offering an all-you-can-eat tier for compute-hungry tasks was a high-stakes gamble that backfired.

For elite developers, researchers, and creators, ChatGPT Pro is currently an accidental bargain. If your daily workflow constantly maxes out o1 pro mode and Sora, you are almost certainly consuming far more compute than your $200 covers. It is worth keeping as long as the terms last.

For the broader AI industry, this marks the beginning of the end for simple flat-rate pricing. When even a $200 monthly plan cannot cover compute costs, the entire SaaS playbook breaks down. Expect OpenAI and its competitors to pivot quickly toward metered, token-by-token billing or much tighter usage caps.