OpenAI is setting its sights on one of the most ambitious goals in the tech industry: by 2030, the company expects around 220 million people to pay for ChatGPT. This projection—drawn from internal forecasting shared with major media outlets—would elevate ChatGPT into the upper tier of global subscription businesses. If OpenAI hits this target, ChatGPT could surpass many long-established subscription platforms and stand alongside the largest digital services in the world.
A Massive User Forecast That Could Reshape the AI Subscription Market
The company believes its total weekly user base could reach 2.6 billion by the end of the decade, meaning approximately 8.5% of those users may convert to a paid plan. That forecast reflects not only confidence in ChatGPT’s growth trajectory but also OpenAI’s broader belief that generative AI will become a daily-use technology across both consumer and professional environments.
This projected leap is significant when compared to the company’s current performance. By July 2025, OpenAI had around 35 million paying customers across ChatGPT Plus and Pro, with pricing tiers that include $20 per month for individual access and higher tiers for professional users who need increased limits or advanced features. At that stage, roughly 5% of weekly active users were paying customers, indicating that OpenAI already had a strong revenue-conversion rate compared to many freemium digital services.
By October 2025, ChatGPT usage surged to approximately 800 million weekly active users, marking one of the fastest adoption curves ever recorded by a modern digital product. The growth was also consistent: usage climbed from around 400 million weekly users earlier in the year, then 700 million by August, and continued rising—a trend driven by new product releases, expanded global access, and increasing workplace integration.
OpenAI expects that its growth curve will remain steep as generative AI becomes more embedded in everyday tasks—from writing and coding to shopping and research. Over the next five years, the company aims to improve personalization, accuracy, multimodal features, and real-world task performance. These improvements are meant to gradually nudge more users into upgrading to paid tiers for better capabilities, while retaining billions of users on the free version.
The lower-priced ChatGPT Go plan—launched earlier in developing markets—also sits at the center of OpenAI’s global strategy. It gives users a more affordable entry point in regions such as India, which is considered OpenAI’s largest user base. This tier helps expand subscriptions in markets where the $20 monthly cost would otherwise limit adoption.
OpenAI is also pushing corporate adoption as a core driver of future paid usage. The company now reports that more than one million businesses actively use its tools. Those enterprise customers represent a major multiplier: a single corporate contract could involve hundreds or thousands of employees using ChatGPT daily.
The strategy is clear. OpenAI wants to move beyond being a popular technology and instead become a fundamental tool that individuals and organizations cannot do without. If the company successfully grows its subscriber ratio to nearly 9% of its total user base, it would redefine what is possible in large-scale AI monetization.
Rising Revenue, Heavy Costs, and OpenAI’s Push Toward Long-Term Sustainability
OpenAI’s growth has been financially impressive and financially demanding at the same time. The company’s revenue has climbed sharply over the past two years, with its annualized revenue run rate expected to hit around $20 billion by the end of 2025. This puts OpenAI in the league of the fastest-growing software companies in history.
Between January and June 2025, OpenAI reportedly generated around $4.3 billion in revenue, surpassing its total revenue from the previous year. Revenue growth was driven by paid ChatGPT subscriptions, enterprise accounts, developer APIs, and usage fees from organizations that integrate OpenAI’s models into their products and workflows.
But the financial picture is not without challenges. OpenAI continues to operate with substantial losses, spending aggressively on research, model training, hiring, and data-center expansion. In the first half of 2025, the company recorded approximately $2.5 billion in losses, largely due to expenses tied to developing and training next-generation AI systems, and the enormous compute costs associated with running these models at a global scale.
Another major factor in the company’s cost structure is the need for massive hardware investments. Advanced models such as GPT-5 and future iterations require high-performance GPUs and custom chips running across vast clusters. This has led OpenAI into closer partnerships with cloud providers and semiconductor companies as it works to secure the compute capacity required for billions of users.
To reduce long-term dependency on third-party chip makers, OpenAI is also investing in the development of custom AI accelerator hardware. These efforts aim to cut per-query costs, improve efficiency, and support more users without exponentially increasing infrastructure expenses.
At the same time, the company is growing its enterprise business rapidly. More than a million organizations now use OpenAI’s tools for tasks like customer service automation, software development, data analysis, marketing, and internal operations. This enterprise ecosystem is expanding as companies see measurable productivity gains by integrating generative AI into daily workflows.
Despite the financial pressure, OpenAI’s strategy appears to hinge on a long-term vision: invest heavily upfront, train increasingly powerful models, build specialized tools, and convert a significant portion of its global user base into paying customers. While the costs are high, the potential rewards—both in revenue and market dominance—are even larger.
If OpenAI’s revenue continues to scale rapidly and costs decline with efficiency improvements and custom hardware, the company could eventually reach sustainability even with heavy investments. But for now, OpenAI remains a high-growth, high-expense company betting that transformative AI will justify its massive spending.
New Revenue Streams: AI Shopping, Commerce Tools, and the Next Phase of Monetization
While subscriptions and enterprise products form the backbone of OpenAI’s business, the company is also aggressively building new revenue streams beyond traditional software models. One of the most notable expansions is OpenAI’s move into shopping and commerce-driven AI tools, which could reshape how people search, shop, and make purchasing decisions online.
In November 2025, OpenAI rolled out a shopping research assistant built into ChatGPT. This assistant is powered by a specialized version of GPT-5 designed specifically for commerce. It allows users to compare products, search for gift ideas, track deals, and find similar items from photos. The tool is available to both free and paid users and aims to become a personalized AI shopping companion that understands user preferences and purchasing behavior.
Even more importantly, OpenAI has begun enabling instant checkout for purchases directly inside ChatGPT. Through partnerships with platforms like Etsy and Shopify, ChatGPT users can buy products without leaving the chat interface. Millions of merchants—including global brands and small businesses—are now accessible through OpenAI’s commerce system.
This positions ChatGPT not just as a search tool but as a direct buying channel, opening the door to affiliate commissions, transaction fees, and advertising revenue. For OpenAI, this could represent a major monetization pathway that doesn’t require users to subscribe.
The company expects roughly 20% of its future revenue to come from these new commerce-driven features. This is strategically important: even if billions of people continue to use ChatGPT for free, their interactions could still generate revenue through shopping recommendations, product discovery, and integrated purchases.
These features also hint at an increasingly agent-driven future for ChatGPT. Instead of simply answering questions, ChatGPT is evolving into a more autonomous assistant that can complete tasks on behalf of the user—whether that means booking, shopping, planning, or managing workflows. This shift could eventually redefine the entire user experience and open new revenue streams built around task automation and AI-driven services.
OpenAI has been expanding in other directions, too. Developer tools, APIs, AI agents, and industry-specific solutions are becoming more sophisticated. The company has signaled interest in broader applications such as education, enterprise automation, and creative industries, where AI-powered tools can simplify complex tasks and replace manual processes.
With growing competition in the AI landscape—from Google, Meta, Anthropic, and others—OpenAI is positioning ChatGPT as a multifunctional platform rather than a single product. By integrating shopping, automation, enterprise solutions, and specialized assistants, OpenAI aims to diversify its revenue streams and reduce reliance on subscription income alone.
If these initiatives succeed, ChatGPT could become not just a conversational model but a universal interface for digital tasks—something that millions of people rely on every day. And if that happens, OpenAI’s projection of 220 million paying users by 2030 may prove conservative.
