ChatGPT Business gets $125 Premium seats with 5x usage

OpenAI is putting a price on uninterrupted work: Premium seats for ChatGPT Business cost five times the standard rate, but they remove the usage ceiling that power users keep slamming into.

OpenAI is adding Premium seats to ChatGPT Business — $125 per user per month ($100 on annual billing) for 5x more usage than the standard $25 seat, with the five-hour usage limit removed entirely. Standard seats stay at $25 monthly ($20 annually), and businesses can mix both tiers in one workspace, so a team that burns through its weekly quota can add a power seat while the rest of the org stays on the cheaper plan. The launch comes with a promotional hook: workspace owners who join the waitlist get $100 in workspace credits for every Premium seat they add, up to $500 for five seats, capped at the first 10,000 eligible customers and ending August 20. Some signups will also get early access before the tier goes generally available.

The five-hour window has been the loudest complaint from ChatGPT Business customers since the plan launched, and this is a direct answer: for the teams running campaigns, analyzing sales data, and building with Codex on larger codebases, the hard reset every five hours is the difference between an assistant and an actual workflow. The pricing is also a tell about where OpenAI thinks enterprise value sits — in usage, not seats. Rather than raising the base plan for everyone, it is charging a fivefold premium only to the heaviest users, and the mixed-seat setup lets finance teams contain the cost instead of upgrading the whole org. That mirrors Anthropic's playbook: Claude Team Premium runs $125 to $150 per seat for Max-class usage, the same "pay for the power users" structure.

It also completes a two-sided pricing story OpenAI has been running all summer. The consumer side got cheaper — GPT-5.6 Luna went free with unlimited chats (we covered that in August — our earlier story), and July 30 brought plan-wide price cuts — while the business side now gains a premium tier on top of the existing plans. Generous at the bottom, surgical at the top: OpenAI is hooking the long tail with free access and monetizing the teams that demonstrably extract value. The promotion's 10,000-customer cap and August 20 deadline are designed to move early adopters now, and the waitlist gives OpenAI a direct read on demand before the tier ships broadly.

What to watch: how fast the 10,000 promo slots fill, and whether Anthropic and Google answer with usage-tiered business pricing of their own.

Is $125 a month for an uncapped ChatGPT seat worth it for your team — or does the five-hour limit rarely bite in practice? Tell us in the comments.

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