{"slug": "chatgpt-pro", "name": "ChatGPT Pro", "category": "ai", "category_name": "AI tools and apps", "description": "", "recommenders": 7, "commenters": 20, "warners": 6, "score": 2.674, "rising": 0.36, "first": "2025-11-26", "latest": "2026-10-13", "why": "it will research Pubmed etc and give you a careful measured answer", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 7, "neutral": 5, "compare": 2, "warn": 6}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 2, 0, 0, 2, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "it will research Pubmed etc and give you a careful measured answer", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "chatgpt.com", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://chatgpt.com", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["ChatGPT Pro", "ChatGPT 5.5 Pro", "ChatGPT 5.2 Pro", "ChatGPT 6 Pro"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 798371120, "item_id": 49898195, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49898195", "by": "Xcelerate", "date": "2026-09-29", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Easily pays for itself in that regard.", "excerpt": "I use a small percentage of my Pro token quota to find better deals on hotels, rental cars, discount codes for large purchases, etc. Have it automatically scanning credit card points promos and flight deals via various APIs too. Easily pays for itself in that regard. Over $1k, I'm not sure it would break even anymore.", "context": "", "use_case": "finding deals on travel and purchases", "switched_from": "", "story": "ChatGPT Pro 500"}, {"id": 796785921, "item_id": 49799120, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49799120", "by": "joefourier", "date": "2026-09-22", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it will research Pubmed etc and give you a careful measured answer", "excerpt": "I use LLMs every day as a search engine replacement, but I\u2019m concerned about this because there\u2019s a vast gulf of capabilities between different models, or even the same models with different reasoning depths. Back in the day everyone had essentially the same Google, and there was no concept of paying to get better search results. But now the average family is going to rely on the ad-ridden ChatGPT Free tier which is ", "context": "uses LLMs daily as search replacement", "use_case": "medical research questions", "switched_from": "", "story": "Study: Young users (9 to 18Y) ditch Google for AI, with unknown consequences"}, {"id": 778377442, "item_id": 48648590, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48648590", "by": "trollbridge", "date": "2026-06-23", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My nontechnical partner likes to talk to ChatGPT 5.5 Pro for image related tasks", "excerpt": "Pay for DeepSeek directly. One developer insists on having his own account and in theory expenses it, but he forgets to turn in $10 expense reports. (Total spend in last two months = about $45.) Pay for OpenAI Pro directly, but I\u2019m the only guy that uses Codex. $100 a month. My nontechnical partner likes to talk to ChatGPT 5.5 Pro for image related tasks (think generating interior decorating pics). The nontechnical s", "context": "small dev team of 6", "use_case": "image related tasks", "switched_from": "", "story": "AI's Affordability Crisis"}, {"id": 776306210, "item_id": 48519138, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48519138", "by": "saurik", "date": "2026-06-13", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'd only bother with ChatGPT Pro.", "excerpt": "This is the kind of problem I expect Claude to be useless at, and while I could see Gemini Deep Think making a good showing, I'd only bother with ChatGPT Pro. FWIW, I do believe it got the correct answer as one of its first two suggestions (though I am not an electrical engineer, so maybe I am not understanding this given the vague/summarized prompt). https://chatgpt.com/share/6a2d8c75-56f4-83e8-a61a-301e4c62b123", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks"}, {"id": 769860496, "item_id": 48116281, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48116281", "by": "pickleRick243", "date": "2026-05-12", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "examples like the following will become common place", "excerpt": "This viewpoint is curdling rapidly. The definition of \"reasoning\" and \"intelligence\" will be debated for ages by philosophers and cognitive scientists, but whatever type of logical/critical thinking is going on in the heads of software engineers and mathematicians, frontier LLMs can now emulate to a very high degree. For mathematics in particular, examples like the following will become common place: https://gowers.w", "context": "", "use_case": "math reasoning", "switched_from": "", "story": "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 801287667, "item_id": 50080479, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50080479", "by": "sebmellen", "date": "2026-10-13", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "ChatGPT 6 Pro and Opus 5.5 have struggled to make any sense", "excerpt": "It\u2019s wild how good it is at explaining nuanced and complex health topics. As an example, I recently had an OCT scan of my retina because I'm a \u201cglaucoma suspect.\u201d I'm a glaucoma suspect because I have an unusually high cup-to-disc ratio, which is a pattern typically seen in glaucomatous patients. As part of this OCT scan, you get a report back on your RNFL, which is basically a report on the health and thickness of y", "context": "", "use_case": "health question answering", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gemini 4 Argon"}, {"id": 798496561, "item_id": 49906035, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49906035", "by": "aennassiri", "date": "2026-09-30", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "you can't just remove half the usage for PRO200", "excerpt": "Pricing decisions are important; you can't just remove half the usage for PRO200 just because you don't have the hardware resources to manage all of the workload. I've been paying for the PRO200 plan since day one, and I've never used it that much because Claude Code was and still is better at coding. I didn't even complain when they started nerfing their models. I love OpenAI, but they should do better on such impor", "context": "ChatGPT Pro 200 subscriber since day one", "use_case": "AI subscription", "switched_from": "", "story": "ChatGPT Pro 500"}, {"id": 798358528, "item_id": 49897408, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49897408", "by": "adamrezich", "date": "2026-09-29", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "this subscription will lose half of its value and then I'll have to pay 2.5x as much to get 1.25x the value", "excerpt": "Very cool how I'm supposed to feel good about paying $200/mo (a VERY expensive subscription!) for months, just to be told that in the near (but not immediate) future this subscription will lose half of its value and then I'll have to pay 2.5x as much to get 1.25x the value I used to get. Fuck that shit!", "context": "$200/mo subscriber", "use_case": "AI subscription", "switched_from": "", "story": "ChatGPT Pro 500"}, {"id": 759296370, "item_id": 47456023, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47456023", "by": "cachius", "date": "2026-03-20", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "for the price of two months of ChatGPT Pro and never bother", "excerpt": "You can go local now with qwen 3.5 9B Q4 powering hermes agent at 35 to 50 tok/s with 99 percent tool call success rate on a used RTX 3060 for the price of two months of ChatGPT Pro and never bother. https://xcancel.com/sudoingX/status/2033020823846674546#m This is the worst local AI will ever be. It only gets better from here. https://xcancel.com/sudoingX/status/2033959603944493192#m", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Regex Blaster"}]}], "who": [{"by": "joefourier", "context": "uses LLMs daily as search replacement", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49799120", "date": "2026-09-22"}, {"by": "trollbridge", "context": "small dev team of 6", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48648590", "date": "2026-06-23"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["ai subscription", "health question answering", "finding deals on travel and purchases", "medical research questions", "generating reasoning traces", "ai coding via codex cli"], "compared": [{"slug": "claude-max", "name": "Claude Max", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "claude-opus", "name": "Claude Opus", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "gemini-ultra", "name": "Gemini Ultra", "co": 1, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "codex", "name": "Codex", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "qwen", "name": "Qwen", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "claude-code", "name": "Claude Code", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49896975", "title": "ChatGPT Pro 500", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50073879", "title": "Gemini 4 Argon", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49798451", "title": "Study: Young users (9 to 18Y) ditch Google for AI, with unknown consequences", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49257876", "title": "Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48799614", "title": "GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra will be in Codex", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48646276", "title": "AI's Affordability Crisis", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"neutral": 1}, "2025-12": {"warn": 2, "compare": 1}, "2026-01": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-02": {"compare": 1}, "2026-03": {"warn": 1}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-05": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 2}, "2026-06": {"recommend": 2}, "2026-07": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 2, "warn": 2}, "2026-10": {"warn": 1}}, "versions": [], "version_unnamed": 0, "family_ref": null, "runs_on": null, "lines": [], "quotes": [{"id": 801287667, "item_id": 50080479, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50080479", "by": "sebmellen", "date": "2026-10-13", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "ChatGPT 6 Pro and Opus 5.5 have struggled to make any sense", "excerpt": "It\u2019s wild how good it is at explaining nuanced and complex health topics. As an example, I recently had an OCT scan of my retina because I'm a \u201cglaucoma suspect.\u201d I'm a glaucoma suspect because I have an unusually high cup-to-disc ratio, which is a pattern typically seen in glaucomatous patients. As part of this OCT scan, you get a report back on your RNFL, which is basically a report on the health and thickness of y", "context": "", "use_case": "health question answering", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gemini 4 Argon"}, {"id": 798496561, "item_id": 49906035, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49906035", "by": "aennassiri", "date": "2026-09-30", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "you can't just remove half the usage for PRO200", "excerpt": "Pricing decisions are important; you can't just remove half the usage for PRO200 just because you don't have the hardware resources to manage all of the workload. I've been paying for the PRO200 plan since day one, and I've never used it that much because Claude Code was and still is better at coding. I didn't even complain when they started nerfing their models. I love OpenAI, but they should do better on such impor", "context": "ChatGPT Pro 200 subscriber since day one", "use_case": "AI subscription", "switched_from": "", "story": "ChatGPT Pro 500"}, {"id": 798371120, "item_id": 49898195, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49898195", "by": "Xcelerate", "date": "2026-09-29", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Easily pays for itself in that regard.", "excerpt": "I use a small percentage of my Pro token quota to find better deals on hotels, rental cars, discount codes for large purchases, etc. Have it automatically scanning credit card points promos and flight deals via various APIs too. Easily pays for itself in that regard. Over $1k, I'm not sure it would break even anymore.", "context": "", "use_case": "finding deals on travel and purchases", "switched_from": "", "story": "ChatGPT Pro 500"}, {"id": 798358528, "item_id": 49897408, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49897408", "by": "adamrezich", "date": "2026-09-29", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "this subscription will lose half of its value and then I'll have to pay 2.5x as much to get 1.25x the value", "excerpt": "Very cool how I'm supposed to feel good about paying $200/mo (a VERY expensive subscription!) for months, just to be told that in the near (but not immediate) future this subscription will lose half of its value and then I'll have to pay 2.5x as much to get 1.25x the value I used to get. Fuck that shit!", "context": "$200/mo subscriber", "use_case": "AI subscription", "switched_from": "", "story": "ChatGPT Pro 500"}, {"id": 796785921, "item_id": 49799120, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49799120", "by": "joefourier", "date": "2026-09-22", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it will research Pubmed etc and give you a careful measured answer", "excerpt": "I use LLMs every day as a search engine replacement, but I\u2019m concerned about this because there\u2019s a vast gulf of capabilities between different models, or even the same models with different reasoning depths. Back in the day everyone had essentially the same Google, and there was no concept of paying to get better search results. But now the average family is going to rely on the ad-ridden ChatGPT Free tier which is ", "context": "uses LLMs daily as search replacement", "use_case": "medical research questions", "switched_from": "", "story": "Study: Young users (9 to 18Y) ditch Google for AI, with unknown consequences"}, {"id": 788191936, "item_id": 49261996, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49261996", "by": "EagleEdge", "date": "2026-08-11", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I ask a question from ChatGPT pro, once it is done", "excerpt": "I used to do a very coarse version of this stealing. I ask a question from ChatGPT pro, once it is done, I ask claude chrome add-in to go through all those thinking from the side bar, extract everything along with all the sources used. Then try to reverse engineer the solution it came up with.", "context": "", "use_case": "generating reasoning traces", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs"}, {"id": 780811809, "item_id": 48800738, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48800738", "by": "agentifysh", "date": "2026-07-05", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "have been using chatgpt pro from codex cli for months now", "excerpt": "many of us and myself have been using chatgpt pro from codex cli for months now https://github.com/agentify-sh/desktop", "context": "", "use_case": "AI coding via Codex CLI", "switched_from": "", "story": "GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra will be in Codex"}, {"id": 778377442, "item_id": 48648590, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48648590", "by": "trollbridge", "date": "2026-06-23", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My nontechnical partner likes to talk to ChatGPT 5.5 Pro for image related tasks", "excerpt": "Pay for DeepSeek directly. One developer insists on having his own account and in theory expenses it, but he forgets to turn in $10 expense reports. (Total spend in last two months = about $45.) Pay for OpenAI Pro directly, but I\u2019m the only guy that uses Codex. $100 a month. My nontechnical partner likes to talk to ChatGPT 5.5 Pro for image related tasks (think generating interior decorating pics). The nontechnical s", "context": "small dev team of 6", "use_case": "image related tasks", "switched_from": "", "story": "AI's Affordability Crisis"}, {"id": 776306210, "item_id": 48519138, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48519138", "by": "saurik", "date": "2026-06-13", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'd only bother with ChatGPT Pro.", "excerpt": "This is the kind of problem I expect Claude to be useless at, and while I could see Gemini Deep Think making a good showing, I'd only bother with ChatGPT Pro. FWIW, I do believe it got the correct answer as one of its first two suggestions (though I am not an electrical engineer, so maybe I am not understanding this given the vague/summarized prompt). https://chatgpt.com/share/6a2d8c75-56f4-83e8-a61a-301e4c62b123", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks"}, {"id": 769860496, "item_id": 48116281, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48116281", "by": "pickleRick243", "date": "2026-05-12", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "examples like the following will become common place", "excerpt": "This viewpoint is curdling rapidly. The definition of \"reasoning\" and \"intelligence\" will be debated for ages by philosophers and cognitive scientists, but whatever type of logical/critical thinking is going on in the heads of software engineers and mathematicians, frontier LLMs can now emulate to a very high degree. For mathematics in particular, examples like the following will become common place: https://gowers.w", "context": "", "use_case": "math reasoning", "switched_from": "", "story": "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"}, {"id": 768507648, "item_id": 48031728, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48031728", "by": "chrisweekly", "date": "2026-05-05", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "", "excerpt": "Tangent: this is one of those situations where slang is harmful to understanding. When I saw \"will absolutely destroy\" my first interpretation was a positive connotation. Of course further context made it clear you were being straightforward, and this isn't aimed at you. Along these lines, \"drop\" has become a problematic term: \"Acme co dropped support for Foo\" means it's EOL, but \"Foo dropped today\" implies it just l", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "Google Ultra", "story": "Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters"}, {"id": 767659664, "item_id": 47978729, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47978729", "by": "J_Shelby_J", "date": "2026-05-01", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "use ChatGPT 5.5 pro to plan a feature and generate an implementation plan", "excerpt": "I use a cli tool to build a document of all relevant code and then use ChatGPT 5.5 pro to plan a feature and generate an implementation plan, and then review and edit and paste it into codex on high to implement. And it works because it won\u2019t stop until the rust compiles. But the code is garbage and makes bad decisions that no junior would. Unmaintainable junk and sometimes I spend more time refactoring than if I wou", "context": "", "use_case": "feature planning", "switched_from": "", "story": "Uber Torches 2026 AI Budget on Claude Code in Four Months"}, {"id": 763331106, "item_id": 47708194, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708194", "by": "jedisct1", "date": "2026-04-09", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Awesome news.", "excerpt": "Awesome news. And that includes usage of the API with any agent without risking being banned. OpenAI is also very supportive of open source software. I'm using GPT-5.4 with Swival (https://swival.dev) for a while, alongside local models, and it's absolutely fantastic.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "ChatGPT Pro now starts at $100/month"}, {"id": 759296370, "item_id": 47456023, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47456023", "by": "cachius", "date": "2026-03-20", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "for the price of two months of ChatGPT Pro and never bother", "excerpt": "You can go local now with qwen 3.5 9B Q4 powering hermes agent at 35 to 50 tok/s with 99 percent tool call success rate on a used RTX 3060 for the price of two months of ChatGPT Pro and never bother. https://xcancel.com/sudoingX/status/2033020823846674546#m This is the worst local AI will ever be. It only gets better from here. https://xcancel.com/sudoingX/status/2033959603944493192#m", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Regex Blaster"}, {"id": 752522402, "item_id": 47032650, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47032650", "by": "Tenemo", "date": "2026-02-16", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "A pretty reasonable answer by ChatGPT, althought it did take 2min4s to answer", "excerpt": "I tested the latest flagship reasoning models (so the only models I use outside of coding for general questions): - Opus 4.6 (Extended thinking): \"Drive it! The whole point is to get the car to the car wash \u2014 you can't wash it if it's still in your driveway.\" - Gemini Pro Deep Think: \"You should definitely drive. Even though 50 meters is a very short distance, if you walk, your car will stay where it is\u2014and it's pret", "context": "", "use_case": "general reasoning questions", "switched_from": "", "story": "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"}, {"id": 746065040, "item_id": 46629065, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46629065", "by": "energy123", "date": "2026-01-14", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "ChatGPT 5.2 Pro only allows 60k tokens, so I have no choice sometimes.", "excerpt": "> Is there any benefit to pruning? 1- Better quality output due to pruning noise, while reducing the chances of missing key context. 2- Saving time/effort by not using my brain to decide which files to include. 3- ChatGPT 5.2 Pro only allows 60k tokens, so I have no choice sometimes. It comes with costs as you identified. It's a trade-off that I am willing to pay.", "context": "", "use_case": "coding with pruned context", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What is best way to provide continuous context to models?"}, {"id": 741788592, "item_id": 46361787, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361787", "by": "F7F7F7", "date": "2025-12-22", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "compared it directly with Claude Max x20", "excerpt": "What are you doing with GPT Pro? I've compared it directly with Claude Max x20 and Google's premium offer. I just don't see myself ever leaving Claude Code as my daily driver. Codex is slow and opaque, albeit accurate. And Gemini is just super clumsy inside of it's CLI (and in OpenRouter) often confusing BASH and plans with actual output.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "GLM-4.7: Advancing the Coding Capability"}, {"id": 740168898, "item_id": 46260556, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46260556", "by": "wyre", "date": "2025-12-13", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "I just learned ChatGPT 5.2 Pro is $168/1mtok. Insanity.", "excerpt": "Highly recommend Claude Max, but I also want to point out Opus 4.5 is the cheapest Opus has ever been. (I just learned ChatGPT 5.2 Pro is $168/1mtok. Insanity.)", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?"}, {"id": 737967361, "item_id": 46122960, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46122960", "by": "poszlem", "date": "2025-12-02", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "ChatGPT seems to have gone down the 'nerfing' road where it now flat out refuses to do what I ask it to do quite often.", "excerpt": "To be honest, this is the first month in almost a year when I didn't pay for ChatGPT Pro and instead went for Gemini Ultra. It's still not there for programming, where I use Claude Max, but for my 'daily driver' (count this, advice on that, 'is this cancer or just a headache' kind of thing), Gemini has finally surpassed ChatGPT for me. And I used to consider it to be the worst of the bunch. I used to consider Gemini ", "context": "pays for multiple AI subscriptions", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race"}, {"id": 736979600, "item_id": 46061225, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46061225", "by": "hamasho", "date": "2025-11-26", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "ChatGPT Pro mode is helpful, but it's too slow", "excerpt": "Honestly, I sometimes use heavy thinking models only to avoid wasting tokens on my expensive pro plans. In many cases, I prefer using quicker models to discuss something, gain better ideas about the topic, do \"my own research\" using Google, then discuss again. ChatGPT Pro mode is helpful, but it's too slow, and I have no idea what they say is true (even with sources) or I'm familiar with the topic so I can research f", "context": "", "use_case": "discussion and research", "switched_from": "", "story": "Investors expect AI use to soar. That's not happening"}]}