OpenAI Pauses Pro Subscriptions Amid a Flood of Astra Users

OpenAI has temporarily stopped accepting new subscribers to its priciest tier, the $200-a-month Pro plan. The company cites unprecedented pressure on its infrastructure, driven by demand for its newest and most powerful model — Astra.

The news came from Thibault (Tibo) Sottiaux, who oversees key products at OpenAI, including Codex and ChatGPT, in a post on the social network X. According to him, it is the Pro tier that places the heaviest load on the systems, which is why sign-ups at that service level were switched off.

“We wanted to take the smallest possible step that would still let us keep access as broad as possible,” Sottiaux wrote. He stressed that the other plans — the API, along with the more affordable Go and Plus tiers — continue to work.

The warning came in advance

The company had flagged the possibility of such a move as early as Wednesday. At the time, Sottiaux noted that demand for Astra was “truly unprecedented”: OpenAI was pulling every available lever to cope with the load, but he had never seen anything like it before, even after living through earlier periods of explosive growth. The priority, he said, would always be quality service for existing users — but if the current momentum held, the company might have to put new Pro subscriptions on hold temporarily.

OpenAI did not specify how long Pro sign-ups would stay closed or how many people are subscribing each day, so it is impossible to gauge the scale of demand in concrete figures. The recent nature of the strain is also hinted at by the fact that limits for Codex users were raised just last month.

What Astra is

The Astra model was unveiled on September 3 and is gradually rolling out across all of OpenAI's tiers — Pro, Plus, Enterprise and Business. Its developers promise a significant leap in the areas where competition is especially fierce: reasoning, coding and computer control. OpenAI even called Astra's release the dawn of the “AGI era” and a generational breakthrough — which, it appears, only fueled the already frenzied interest.

Source: TechCrunch