No, it isn’t. It makes no sense and I can’t believe you would think this is a strategy they’re pursuing. This is a Pro/Plus account feature, so the users don’t pay anything extra, and they’re planning to make this free for everyone. I very much doubt this feature would generate a lot of traffic anyway - it’s basically one more message to process per day.

OpenAI clearly recently focuses on model cost effectiveness, with the intention of making inference nearly free.

What do you think the weekly limit is on GPT-5-Thinking usage on the $20 plan? Write down a number before looking it up.