Analyst says OpenAI is betting on enterprises paying more in order to receive enhanced AI capabilities.
The $200 monthly pricing OpenAI has set for a subscription to its recently launched ChatGPT Pro is definitely “surprising,” said Gartner analyst Arun Chandrasekaran on Friday, but at the same time it’s indicative that the company is betting that organizations will ultimately pay more for enhanced AI capabilities.
In an announcement on Thursday, OpenAI said the plan, priced at nearly 10 times more than its existing corporate plans, includes access to OpenAI o1, as well as to o1-mini, GPT-4o, and Advanced Voice.
Part of the company’s 12 days of Shipmas campaign, it also includes OpenAI o1 pro mode, a version of o1 that, the company said, “uses more compute to think harder and provide even better answers to the hardest problems. In the future, we expect to add more powerful, compute-intensive productivity features to this plan.”
For considerably less, OpenAI’s previously most expensive subscription, ChatGPT Team, offers a collaborative workspace with limited access to OpenAI o1 and o1-mini, and an admin console for workspace management, and costs $25 per user per month. And ChatGPT Plus, which also offers limited access to o1 and o1-mini, plus standard and advanced voice, is $20 per user per month.
ChatGPT Pro also costs far more than its competitors are charging. A 12-month commitment to the enterprise edition of Gemini Code Assist, which Google describes as “an AI-powered collaborator that helps your development team build, deploy and operate applications throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC),” costs $45 per user per month.
Monthly pricing plans for Anthropic’s Claude AI range from $18 for Claude Pro to $25 for the Claude Team edition, while the cost per user per month with an annual subscription for Microsoft 365 Copilot, which contains Copilot Studio for the creation of AI agents and the ability to automate business processes, is $30.
Small target market
With its new plan, said Chandrasekaran, OpenAI is not “targeting information retrieval use cases, because the chatbot is actually pretty effective for them.”
This latest salvo is, he said is “more about potentially using [ChatGPT Pro] as a decision intelligence tool to automate tasks that human beings do. That’s kind of the big bet here, but nevertheless, it’s still a very big jump in price, because GPT Plus is $20 per user per month. And even the ChatGPT Enterprise, which is the enterprise version of the product, is $60 or $70, so it’s a very, very big jump in my opinion.”
Thomas Randall, director of AI market research at Info-Tech Research Group, said, “the persona for ChatGPT’s ‘Pro’ offering will be very narrowly scoped, and it isn’t quite clear who that is. This is especially the case as ChatGPT has an ‘enterprise’ plan for organizations that can still take advantage of the ‘Pro’ offering. ‘Pro’ will perhaps be for individuals with highly niche use cases, or small businesses.”
‘Plus’ remains competitive
But, he said, “the value add between ‘Plus’ and ‘Pro’ is not currently clear from a marketing perspective. The average user of ChatGPT will still do well with the free option, perhaps being persuaded to pay for ‘Plus’ if they are using it more extensively for content writing or coding. When priced against other tools, ChatGPT’s ‘Plus’ will remain very competitive against its rivals.”
According to Randall, “Anthropic is still trying to achieve market share (though it has recently fumbled with an ambiguous marketing campaign), while Gemini is not currently accurate enough in its outputs to effectively position itself. As an example, when I asked ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Gemini to give me a list of 100 historical events for a certain country, ChatGPT and Anthropic were comparable, but Gemini would only list up to 40, but still call it a list of 100.”
As for Microsoft Copilot, he said, it “still struggles to showcase the value-add of its rather expensive licensing. While Microsoft certainly needs to show revenue return from the amount it has invested in Copilot, the product has not been immediately popular, and was perhaps released too early. We may end up seeing a rebrand, or Copilot eventually being packaged with Microsoft’s enterprise plans.”
