OpenAI has moved quickly to ease tensions with its paying customers after last week’s rocky rollout of GPT-5. CEO Sam Altman confirmed on X that ChatGPT Plus subscribers will see “significantly” higher daily message limits when using the model’s reasoning capabilities. This change comes after widespread complaints about the previous 200-message-per-day cap, which many felt undermined the value of a $20/£20 monthly subscription.
Altman also noted that all model-class limits will soon be higher than before GPT-5’s launch and announced a forthcoming user interface change that will display which model is responding to each prompt. The adjustments follow several days of criticism, not only for GPT-5’s limitations but also for the brief removal of the popular GPT-4o model—something OpenAI has since reversed.
The backlash underscores a broader frustration among longtime users. The GPT-5 launch was hyped as a major leap forward, yet early impressions suggest the upgrade may feel more incremental than revolutionary. For some subscribers, the excitement of AI chatbots has worn off, making smaller changes—such as UI tweaks or modest performance boosts—feel less like progress and more like disruption to familiar workflows.
The messaging cap increase addresses one immediate pain point, but it also highlights the challenge OpenAI faces in balancing ambitious product launches with the expectations of a growing, vocal user base. Each adjustment to pricing, features, or limits risks alienating customers who have grown accustomed to a certain way of working with the tool.
For now, Plus subscribers can look forward to more generous GPT-5 usage, though the exact new limits remain unspecified. Whether this will be enough to restore goodwill ahead of OpenAI’s next update is another question—especially if future “improvements” continue to spark as much frustration as excitement.
