I also have a feeling that $200 was where most users will draw the line. $500 looks like such a slippery slope in the field where all the recent SOTA models, including Chinese ones, are considered good enough for most work.

There also doesn't seem to be a lot of differentiation between the tiers. They claim (or previously claimed) that the $200 plan was 20x usage, but now they say $500 is 25x usage.

They've since taken down the 20x usage mention on their pricing page. https://archive.is/bCZav

I suspect the $500 will sell well. Maybe not for the staff developer, but I can definitely see the exec who thinks he can replace all his developers by vibe coding things himself inbetween meetings seeing a 6x speed up button and buying without a second thought.

$6k/year/seat is not particularly expensive for a dev tool if (very big if) you can measure the value and demonstrate it's worthwhile. That's the missing piece. People look at cheaper options because they don't know if the expensive one is working.

If OpenAI can show that a $6k tool nets $50k in productivity or quality or speed they have no problem selling it. Companies will take the easy-but-expensive option over a cheaper alternative. The problem is that's really hard to measure and seemingly they've put no effort into trying.