THE ESSENTIALS IN 30 SECONDS

  • The limits cover ChatGPT Go, Plus and the Pro 100, 200 and 500 tiers; Free, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts are excluded.
  • Users over the cap see a 'Device limit reached' message, and signing out of another account does not free a slot, according to reports on OpenAI's help page.
  • OpenAI points users who need more capacity to extra credits or paid usage resets, which The Decoder says generally cost more than another subscription.

OpenAI has started restricting how many paid ChatGPT accounts can be used on a single device or billed to a single payment card. The rule is set out in a help center article titled "Understanding card and device limits in ChatGPT", which The Decoder and BigGo Finance both summarized on November 1. Neither report gives the exact number of accounts allowed.

Who is affected

The limits apply to consumer paid plans: ChatGPT Go, Plus and the Pro 100, Pro 200 and Pro 500 tiers, according to both reports. Free accounts and the organizational Business, Enterprise and Edu plans are not covered. A user who links too many subscriptions to one card or device cannot start another one.

When the cap is reached, ChatGPT shows a "Device limit reached" message and the affected account cannot be used on that device. BigGo reports the message may appear at login or cut a session short, even after a payment has gone through. Logging out of a different account does not release a slot. Because the limit also follows the payment card, a household sharing one card, or people using a shared public device, can run into it even if each person has a separate account; OpenAI directs those cases to support. BigGo adds that subscriptions bought before the restriction can continue under an exception, but cancelling one does not guarantee that a replacement will be approved, and the help page offers a cancel-and-refund route when the warning appears at sign-in.

Steering toward paid usage

Instead of extra subscriptions, OpenAI points users who want more capacity to buying credits or paid usage resets. BigGo notes that these purchases do not lift a card or device restriction; they are presented as the approved way to add usage, with credits sold through the usage and billing section of the Codex app. The Decoder says these options generally cost more than an additional subscription.

The Decoder expects the change to hit people who rotate between several low-cost flat-rate plans on one device to stretch their limits, and reads it as a sign that OpenAI is putting revenue ahead of growth. BigGo links the move to OpenAI's plan to pool ChatGPT and Codex usage from December and to Codex adding multi-account switching on mobile. OpenAI has not explained its reasons in the sources reviewed, and the help article itself could not be opened for this report, so details rely on these two summaries.