OpenAI releases a cheaper ChatGPT subscription

OpenAI is expanding a low-cost subscription tier called ChatGPT Go to the US and the rest of the world. Go was released in India in August and later became available in another 170 countries prior to Friday’s global release. “In markets where Go has been available, we’ve seen strong adoption and regular everyday use for tasks like writing, learning, image creation, and problem-solving,” the company’s announcement stated.

For $8 per month, Go subscribers get more messages, file uploads, and image generation than the free ChatGPT tier subscribers. The price slots Go between the free version of the AI chatbot and the $20-a-month “Plus” subscription tier.

OpenAI says the Go tier is meant for people who want greater access to the company’s fast version of the latest AI model, GPT-5.2 Instant. Currently, free users are limited to 10 messages with GPT‑5.2 every five hours — after that, and the chats switch to the “mini version” of the model. Plus subscribers get 160 messages with GPT‑5.2 for every three hours. Given that the announcement says that users will get “10x” the messages, files, and images than the free tier, we can guess that Go will get 100 messages with GPT-5.2 for who-knows-how-many hours.

The announcement did not specify the number of file uploads or images available each day to Go users. OpenAI does not provide the number of file uploads or images for any of their ChatGPT tiers: free users have a “limited” number of file uploads and image generations, according to the pricing website, while Plus subscribers have a “check-mark” listed instead of an amount.

The memory and context window will be greater for Go users than free users. Again, exact numbers are yet not known. The current context window for non-reasoning requests is 16K for free users and 32K for Plus, while both tiers have a 196K context window for reasoning.

OpenAI says it will “soon” begin running ads in Go in the US, while Plus and higher priced subscriptions will remain ad-free.