OpenAI has stopped selling its Pro plan for now. If you want to sign up for the $200-a-month tier today, you cannot. The reason is demand for GPT-6 Astra, the new flagship model from earlier this month.
Existing subscriptions keep working, as do the API, Go and Plus. Astra itself stays available in Pro, Plus, Enterprise and Business - just without new Pro customers.
What OpenAI says
Product lead Thibault Sottiaux calls the demand “really unprecedented” and frames the move as the minimum viable one: “We wanted to take the smallest step that allows us to continue giving the broadest access possible.” The company says it is pulling every lever it has to keep up.
How long the pause lasts, OpenAI does not say. How many sign-ups arrive per day, also not. Last month it had just raised usage limits for Codex users.
Why this one stuck with me
OpenAI called Astra the beginning of the “AGI era”. Two weeks later the most expensive plan is sold out because the data centers cannot keep pace.
That is the unglamorous version of what everyone else was arguing about this week. You do not need to talk about alignment to see that capacity sets the tempo: at Anthropic it shows up as usage limits, at OpenAI it now shows up as a closed till. If you are deciding today which model carries your product in three months, price that in.
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