OpenAI has significantly expanded its footprint in Africa by launching its new budget subscription, ChatGPT Go, across all African countries, effective Wednesday, October 15, 2025. This expansion includes local currency support in select markets, with South Africa being one of them.
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While the launch aims to make AI more accessible, South African users of the existing premium tiers will see price increases:
| ChatGPT Plan | South African Price | U.S. Price (Converted) | Price Difference (vs. USD) |
| Go | R149 | $4 (R69) | 115.94% |
| Plus | R399 | $20 (R347) | 14.99% |
| Pro | R3,999.99 | $200 (R3,467) | 15.37% |
Both the ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Pro plans are now priced approximately 15% higher than the standard converted US dollar price, a difference that aligns with South Africa’s Value-Added Tax (VAT) rate. The Pro plan, which offers access to the extended reasoning version of GPT-5, is now R3,999.99 per month.
The new ChatGPT Go plan, priced at R149 per month, is positioned as a middle ground between the free service and the Plus subscription. It was initially trailed in India and Indonesia before its wider rollout across 18 Asian countries last week, and now, all of Africa.
Despite its significantly higher price compared to the converted $$$4 US price (in markets where it is available), ChatGPT Go offers substantial benefits over the free tier, including:
- 10x higher message limits with GPT-5.
- 10x more image generations per day.
- 10x more file or image uploads per day.
- 2x longer memory for more personalized responses.
However, the budget plan excludes premium features such as the Sora video generation model and the Codex agent, and it provides only limited deep research functionality.
ChatGPT Chief Nick Turley stated that the launch is a response to Africa’s rapid AI adoption: “With ChatGPT Go, we want to make cutting-edge AI affordable and accessible—so everyone can benefit from it.”
OpenAI recently announced its new large language model, GPT-5, which is available to all users, with Plus and Pro subscribers receiving higher usage limits. Pro subscribers get access to GPT-5 Pro, a version featuring extended reasoning promising more comprehensive and accurate answers.
GPT-5 operates as a unified system that uses a real-time router to direct queries to either a smart, efficient model for most questions or a deeper reasoning model (GPT-5 thinking) for harder problems.
Following its launch in August, the model initially faced criticism from users who reported poor answers. CEO Sam Altman later confirmed the issue was due to an error in the router, which was incorrectly directing queries to the wrong model.
Separately, OpenAI launched the Sora 2 video generation model and its new Sora app at the end of September. OpenAI touts its latest video model as more physically accurate, realistic, and controllable than previous systems, now including synchronized dialogue and sound effects.
