OpenAI tests $40 usage reset on the $100 ChatGPT plan

A ChatGPT user on the $100/month plan found an offer to buy a usage-limit reset for $40, according to a screenshot posted to r/OpenAI on September 17. The offer showed up on web only, and it kept disappearing after several refreshes, even while the user sat at 0% of their usage remaining. One commenter in the thread says the feature has been A/B tested for months.

If you run agent work against a subscription plan instead of the API, this is the thing to watch. Usage caps on ChatGPT and Codex have mostly worked like a monthly allowance: you get a number, you spend it, you wait for the reset. A purchasable reset turns that allowance into a metered product with a second price tag hiding behind the first.

The same subreddit had two adjacent threads the same day. A Codex user on a 20x plan plus an extra 5x plan reported burning through both 5 to 10 times faster than the week before, on agentic WordPress work. A separate thread argued that free reset grants, the kind OpenAI used to hand out as goodwill when someone hit a wall mid-project, have gotten harder to come by since the Astra release shipped.

None of this is confirmed by OpenAI. The Reddit thread is a user screenshot and a commenter's recollection, not a company announcement, and it doesn't say whether the $40 reset is a permanent SKU, a regional test, or a percentage of users in an A/B split. What it does show is the direction: headroom that used to come from a support ticket or a quiet grant is starting to show up as a button with a price on it. If you're budgeting a monthly plan against real agent workloads, don't assume the old cushion is still there.