A USD 200 AI seat now exists. What that tells you about pricing
OpenAI released o1 out of preview on 5 December 2024 behind a new ChatGPT Pro tier at USD 200 a month. The tier is more interesting than the model.
On 5 December 2024, opening a run of daily announcements, OpenAI took its o1 reasoning model out of preview and introduced ChatGPT Pro, a subscription at USD 200 per month with unlimited access to its strongest models.
Two years ago the entire market was one price: twenty dollars. The appearance of a tier ten times higher tells you something structural about where this is going.
What the tier actually signals
Reasoning costs real money. A model that thinks before answering consumes far more computation per answer. That cost was previously hidden behind a flat subscription. It is now visible in the price list.
AI seats will stop being uniform. The idea that everyone in a company gets the same licence is already ending. Most staff need drafting and summarising, which is cheap. A handful of people doing analysis, contract comparison or complex planning will justify something much dearer.
Per-seat pricing is under strain. When the cost of serving one user varies by a factor of fifty depending on what they ask, a flat seat price stops making sense for the vendor and for you.
What an SME should do with this
Do not buy the expensive tier for everyone. Almost nobody needs it, and a premium licence used for rewriting emails is the most expensive way to rewrite emails.
Instead, ask which two or three tasks in your company are genuinely worth a slower, dearer, better answer. In a Swiss SME they usually are: comparing a long contract against your standard terms, working through a pricing or capacity question with real constraints, checking a technical specification for contradictions.
Those tasks happen a few times a month, not a few times an hour. Budget accordingly: one or two premium seats for the people who do that work, ordinary seats for everyone else.
The wider point
The question « what does AI cost? » no longer has one answer. From now on it depends on which task, at what quality, how often. Companies that can name their tasks will price this well. Companies that cannot will buy a licence for everyone and wonder where the value went.