OpenAI reopens sign-ups for its $200/month Pro tier while halving the API credits provided per dollar to encourage pay-per-use, and removes the five-hour cap (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder)

OpenAI’s updated Pro tier removes the rigid five-hour usage cap, giving subscribers more flexibility to allocate their weekly AI usage, but it also cuts API credits per dollar in half to push customers toward pay-per-use economics. For CIOs and IT leaders, this signals a shift from bundled value to usage-based spend, making cost governance, consumption monitoring, and workload placement decisions more important as AI adoption scales.