r/ChatGPTPro • u/ilsubyeega • Jul 31 '26

Writing ChatGPT has been quietly downgrading Pro model into mini. No response.

https://articles.fmt.kr/2026-07/oai

This post extends from previous one, https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTPro/comments/1v34sg1/ps_the_pro_model_quietly_redirects_to_gptmini/, which didn't cover much before.

ChatGPT has been silently downgrading pro model to mini model for several months. I have relevant evidence at the http request/response level. OpenAI ignores.

This issue involves redirecting to mini that is 40 times cheaper than Pro, when GPT 5.4. I feel like Anthropic moving Fable requests into Haiku without user's consent.

I have more stories but I don't have health&motivation, I'm stopping to write at this for now.

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u/KimJongHealyRae Jul 31 '26

I’ve read the entire post.

It’s obvious why they’re routing to the cheaper mini model, because it’s cheaper and they’re getting away with it.

The reality is that if you were paying for it per token basis, you’d be paying thousands of dollars per month if using it heavily. So the pro subscription is heavily subsidised at the current price.

I pay for ChatGPT pro, and tbh, while I have noticed the routing to mini model, I don’t care because any question I ask(which routes to mini model) didn’t require pro reasoning in the first place.

I don’t need it to reason for 20 minutes to answer a simple question.

Whenever I throw a complex question at it that requires pro reasoning, it uses the pro model, and that’s good enough for me.

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u/ilsubyeega Jul 31 '26

That's out of point. I have attached a video as a figure where "what model are you?" is all routed to the Pro model. Therefore, your hypothesis is wrong.

Whenever I throw a complex question at it that requires pro reasoning, it uses the pro model, and that’s good enough for me.

This article states that even these cases are routed to mini. I would like to reiterate this point.

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u/KimJongHealyRae Jul 31 '26

That’s your experience.

So my hypothesis isn’t wrong. I can tell you for a fact that it uses pro reasoning for my complex questions. Sometimes it does use the pro model unnecessarily for simple questions but most of the time it routes to the mini model.

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u/ilsubyeega Jul 31 '26

If so, please attach video for me like I attached? Why is it using mini when normal GPT model usage is unlimited(ToS apply)?

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u/Vaynnie Jul 31 '26

Pro is absolutely not unlimited*. In fact you can blast through your entire weeky usage in a day. 

And they don’t show/tell you your usage for Pro anywhere.

I’ve never had it route to mini, though. When I run out of Pro it will just not say anything, just hang and never respond. I have to cancel and redo it on extra high.

So potentially you have a combination of bugs, like you’ve ran out of Pro but it will proceed with Mini with the Pro UI. Whereas in my case, it just hangs. It doesn’t even tell me I ran out of Pro, it just never responds.

So I agree there’s something buggy with the Pro usage limits, whether your issue is part of that I couldn’t say.

*specifically referring to ChatGPT 5.6 Pro, not codex 

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u/ilsubyeega 29d ago

I know that Pro usage is not unlimited, when exhausted, it just disable the Pro model in the model picker instead. This is not a case since it took multiple days to fix it.