OpenAI announced on August 6, 2026, that it’s removing the message cap on everyday text chats for Free and Go users, powered by a new default model called GPT-5.6 Luna. It’s a meaningful shift for a service OpenAI says now reaches over a billion people weekly; free users have long hit invisible walls mid-conversation, and that friction is going away, at least for plain text.
GPT-5.6 Luna replaces GPT-5.5 as the default model this week, with the unlimited text chats and a new “Think” button rolling out the following week. The Think button lets free users manually ask the model to slow down and reason more carefully on a tough question, rather than always getting the fast default response, something previously reserved for paid tiers or specific reasoning modes.
The word “unlimited” comes with fine print, though. OpenAI’s own pricing page is specific: it covers text chats only. Image generation, file uploads, voice chats, deep research, memory, and Codex access all keep their existing caps. Abuse guardrails still apply too, so this isn’t a blank check on usage.
Paid users aren’t left out. Plus and Pro subscribers get an upgraded GPT-5.6 Sol, tuned for sharper accuracy on dates and numbers, along with a manual thinking-effort slider to control how hard the model works on a given answer.
The real headline here isn’t “unlimited” it’s that OpenAI just closed a big part of the gap between what free and paid users can actually do day to day.
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