ChatGPT Plans Compared (Aug 2026): Go vs Plus vs Pro — Prices & Limits

TL;DR. ChatGPT has a free plan (GPT-5.6 Luna in standard chat with unlimited text chats since August 2026, GPT-5.6 Terra in Codex/Work), a budget Go plan ($8/month, same Luna default with roomier limits), a Plus plan ($20/month) that unlocks GPT-5.6 Sol in standard ChatGPT plus Sol/Terra/Luna in Codex and Work, and a Pro plan with a usage toggle: $100/month for 5× Plus usage or $200/month for 20×, plus the Sol Pro level. Business ($20–25/seat) and Enterprise (custom) cover organizations.

	Free	Go	Plus	Pro
Price	$0	$8/mo	$20/mo	$100/mo (5× Plus) or $200/mo (20×)
Model	GPT-5.6 Luna	GPT-5.6 Luna	GPT-5.6 Sol (thinking slider)	GPT-5.6 Sol + Sol Pro ("Pro reasoning")
Messages & limits	Unlimited text chats (abuse guardrails apply); uploads and tools capped	~10× Free on messages, uploads, images; may include ads	Expanded limits on everything; no ads	5× or 20× Plus usage; "unlimited" core chat subject to guardrails
Image generation	"Limited and slower" — observed roughly 2–3/day	~10× Free (observed: a couple dozen/day)	Observed ~40–50 per 3-hour window	Unlimited and faster (guardrails)
Codex & Sites	"Limited Codex access" + limited Work (desktop) on Terra; no Sites	Same limited Codex/Work on Terra; no Sites	"Expanded Codex usage" + Work on desktop, web, mobile with Sol/Terra/Luna; Sites included	"Maximum Codex tasks"; Sites included
Best for	Trying it out, casual questions	Heavy chat on a budget	Daily professional use (the default pick)	Running agents all day, hitting Plus limits

Quoted wording is from OpenAI's live pricing page (chatgpt.com/pricing); image counts are observed, not official caps. Comparing with Claude? See Claude pricing.

OpenAI's ladder now has six rungs, and the plan cards don't make it obvious which GPT model you get on each. Below: the Go-vs-Plus call, then every plan in plain English.

ChatGPT Go vs Plus: which one?

Plus, unless you only chat. The $12 gap between Go ($8) and Plus ($20) buys the GPT-5.6 Sol flagship in regular ChatGPT, full deep research, the Codex and Work agents on Sol/Terra/Luna, ChatGPT Sites, custom GPTs, and an ad-free experience — Go stays on Luna, gets lighter deep research, no Sites, and may show ads. Go is the right call if you hit Free's upload or image limits but never need the strongest model or the agents. If ChatGPT touches your actual work most days, Plus pays for itself the first time Sol handles something Luna can't.

New to the jargon? The AI glossary explains tokens, context windows, and usage caps in plain English.

Is there a ChatGPT family plan?

No — there is no ChatGPT family plan as of August 2026. Every consumer plan (Go, Plus, Pro) is a single-user subscription, and OpenAI's terms prohibit sharing one login. The workarounds: give each household member their own account (Free now has unlimited text chat on Luna), or set up a ChatGPT Business workspace — minimum two seats at roughly $20–25 per seat — for one bill with separate logins and Plus-level features. OpenAI has shipped parental controls for teen accounts and is hiring around family and caregiver experiences, and analysts expect a family tier eventually, but nothing has been announced.

What is the Frontier Pro model?

"Frontier Pro" is the name people search for and an earlier label — OpenAI's pricing page today calls it "Pro reasoning with GPT-5.6 Sol Pro." It's the Pro-tier intelligence level: the Sol flagship running in OpenAI's maximum-reasoning "pro" mode, shown as Sol Pro in the model picker on Pro (and, per Codex documentation, Business and Enterprise). It is a setting on Sol rather than a separate model: it spends far more compute per answer on the hardest analysis, coding, and research questions, and it's the main reason to pay for Pro beyond raw usage. Don't confuse it with OpenAI Frontier, the enterprise agent platform launched in February 2026 — sold through sales, not through any ChatGPT plan.

The plans, top to bottom

Free — $0. Use ChatGPT at chatgpt.com with no payment. Since August 6, 2026 standard chat runs GPT-5.6 Luna with unlimited text chats (subject to abuse guardrails) — file uploads, images, and other tools are still capped. Codex and ChatGPT Work get limited desktop access to GPT-5.6 Terra. Good for trying things out and casual questions.

Go — $8/month. The budget tier: roughly 10× Free's messages, uploads, and image creation, longer memory, and expanded voice mode. Standard chat runs GPT-5.6 Luna (the same unlimited-text default as Free) rather than Sol, and Codex and ChatGPT Work get the same limited desktop access to GPT-5.6 Terra as Free. No Sites, limited deep research, and OpenAI notes that Go may include ads.

Plus — $20/month. The plan most working professionals want. Plus unlocks the GPT-5.6 flagship, Sol, in regular ChatGPT and the full Sol / Terra / Luna family in Codex, along with a thinking slider that sets how hard Sol reasons, advanced image creation, expanded memory across chats, the Codex coding agent, the Work agent for multi-step tasks, ChatGPT Sites (build and host web apps from chat), expanded deep research, and Projects and custom GPTs. If ChatGPT is part of your workday, this is the default choice.

Pro — $100 or $200/month. One plan, two usage levels: a toggle on the pricing page picks 5× Plus usage for $100 or 20× for $200. Both add "Pro reasoning with GPT-5.6 Sol Pro" (the level searchers often call the Frontier Pro model — see the section above), maximum access to the Codex and Work agents, unlimited core chat and faster image creation ("unlimited subject to abuse guardrails," per OpenAI), maximum memory and context, and early access to experimental features. Pro is for people running agents hard all day — if you're not hitting Plus limits, you don't need it.

Business — about $20–25 per seat/month. Roughly $20/seat on annual billing ($25 monthly), with admin controls, SSO, and workspace management. The "ChatGPT for the whole office" option.

Enterprise — custom pricing. User provisioning (SCIM), data residency, compliance controls, and volume terms. Priced by sales, not self-serve.

Which model you actually get

This is the part the plan cards bury. The current family is GPT-5.6, released July 9, 2026: Sol (flagship), Terra (balanced intelligence and cost), and Luna (high-volume and low-cost). Codex lets eligible subscribers select those models directly. Regular ChatGPT presents the family through plan-level controls rather than model names you pick yourself: on Plus and above, the updated Sol handles both quick replies and deep reasoning through one model, with a slider for how much it thinks; Pro, Business, and Enterprise also get the Sol Pro level.

Free and Go stayed on GPT-5.5 when GPT-5.6 shipped, then moved to GPT-5.6 Luna as their default on August 6, 2026 — OpenAI says answers with at least one factual error were about 62% less common with Luna than with the outgoing GPT-5.5 Instant. The one exception still holds: Codex and ChatGPT Work give Free and Go Terra access. Sol in standard ChatGPT still begins at Plus.

"Wait, is this the API or the subscription?"

Same trap as every AI product: there are two completely separate ways to pay OpenAI.

• The subscription (Free / Go / Plus / Pro / Business / Enterprise) — a flat monthly fee for using ChatGPT, the apps, and the bundled agents. This is what almost every professional wants.
• The API — pay-per-use pricing in tokens, for developers building GPT into their own software. Current standard rates for requests with up to 272K input tokens are Sol $5/$30, Terra $2/$12, Luna $0.20/$1.20 per million input/output tokens. Cached input is $0.50, $0.20, and $0.02 respectively; longer-context requests cost more.

If you just want to use ChatGPT for work, the per-token numbers have nothing to do with your bill.

Where Codex and ChatGPT Work fit

Codex and ChatGPT Work are plan features rather than separate subscriptions. Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise can choose Sol, Terra, or Luna, with the higher plans providing more usage. Work completes multi-step tasks across connected apps; Codex focuses on software work. Consumption still depends on model, context, reasoning, tools, and task complexity.

ChatGPT Sites — OpenAI's build-and-host-a-web-app-from-chat feature, in public beta since July 9, 2026 — is on paid plans only: Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise, not Free or Go; available in the EEA, Switzerland, and the UK since July 20, 2026. Usage limits are shown in-product rather than on the pricing page (see OpenAI's Sites docs). What is ChatGPT Sites? has the details.

Custom GPTs don't cost extra either — building and using them is included from Plus up.

How many images can you generate on each plan?

A question we get a lot — and one OpenAI doesn't answer with fixed numbers. The August 2026 "unlimited text chats" change on Free and Go explicitly does not cover images, so the practical picture is unchanged: Free gets roughly 2–3 image generations per day. Go is marketed as about 10× Free's image creation — call it a couple dozen a day, flexing with demand. Plus users commonly report around 40–50 images per rolling 3-hour window. Pro includes "unlimited and faster image creation" subject to abuse guardrails — the only tier where you effectively stop counting. These are observed numbers, not published caps: OpenAI adjusts them with demand, so the banner inside ChatGPT is the source of truth for your account. For the full cross-vendor picture — including message caps and how Gemini's published image limits compare — see AI usage limits compared.

Which plan should you actually pick?

• Just exploring? Start on Free.
• Heavy casual use, budget matters? Go ($8/mo) — knowing you're on Luna, not the Sol flagship, and may see ads.
• Using ChatGPT for real work most days? Plus ($20/mo) — flagship model, Codex, Work agent, custom GPTs.
• Running agents constantly, hitting limits? Pro — start at the $100/5× level; jump to $200/20× only if you actually hit the ceiling.
• Rolling it out to a team? Business, or Enterprise for compliance controls.

Start at Plus. Move up when you feel a limit, not before.

How this compares to Claude

The ladders mirror each other almost rung for rung: both anchor at $20/month for the individual plan (ChatGPT Plus vs Claude Pro) and both sell $100/$200 power tiers (ChatGPT Pro vs Claude Max). ChatGPT's real pricing edge is the $8 Go tier Claude doesn't match; Claude's is that its desktop agent (Claude Cowork) is included on every paid plan from Pro up at no extra charge. If you're choosing between the two $20 plans, price won't decide it — see the full Claude vs ChatGPT comparison for where each genuinely wins, and what shipped in GPT-5.6 for the latest on OpenAI's side.

Prices, plan features, and model names are an August 2026 snapshot (reviewed August 24) checked against OpenAI's live pricing page (chatgpt.com/pricing) and its August 6 model-update announcement. Image counts and per-plan Sites availability come from OpenAI help articles (learn.chatgpt.com/docs/sites) and user reports, not the pricing page. Everything here changes fast, so confirm current numbers before buying. This article is informational and not financial or purchasing advice.