Openai’s Chatgpt Is So Popular That Almost No One Will Pay For It

OpenAI is losing about three times more money than it’s earning, and 95 percent of those using ChatGPT, which generates roughly 70 percent of the company’s recurring revenue, aren’t paying a dime to help stem the losses.

For this level of success, the company is reportedly valued at about $500 billion, even as it commits to spending more than $1 trillion that it doesn’t have in partnership deals over the next five years.

According to a report published last month in The Information, OpenAI during the first half of 2025 collected $4.3 billion in revenue while still posting a net loss of $13.5 billion during that six month period.

More than half of that loss is attributable to “remeasurement of convertible interest rights,” which The Information suggests is a reference to billions of dollars’ worth of convertible equity issued to investors. 

The Financial Times reports that OpenAI had an operating loss of about $8 billion for the first half of the year, which presumably excludes the equity obligations.

The Financial Times also says that OpenAI is presently booking $13 billion in annual recurring revenue – a projection of future business based on revenue of over $1 billion in a recent month that some find dubious. 

About 70 percent of OpenAI’s recurring revenue reportedly comes from those paying for ChatGPT subscriptions (Free, $20/month, $200/month).

But of ChatGPT’s 800 million users, just 5 percent pay, according to a senior executive who spoke to the Financial Times. Menlo Ventures came to a similar estimate based on a $10 billion annual run rate and about 800 million monthly active users – about 40 million would be paying $20 per month to generate that much revenue.

Five percent is actually a higher-than-average figure for the percentage of those willing to pay for AI. Menlo Ventures calculates that just 3 percent of the 1.8 billion people using generative AI services overall pay.

“This gap between usage and payment represents a major opportunity,” the VC firm observed in June with no small amount of optimism.

A ZDNET/Aberdeen study published in May suggests a limit to that optimism – only eight percent of respondents said they’d pay extra for AI.

OpenAI did not respond to a request to comment.

OpenAI aims to double its paying customer base in an unspecified time frame, per The Financial Times, which notes that CEO Sam Altman has committed to buying more than 26 gigawatts of datacenter capacity from AMD, Broadcom, Nvidia, and Oracle through the end of the decade at a cost of more than $1 trillion.

This spending spree is supported by, among others, Nvidia, which says it will invest $100 billion in OpenAI – presumably much of which will take the form of GPU credits. More than a few have observed this circular investment scheme looks a lot like a bubble.

OpenAI has other theoretical revenue streams, like charging a commission for items purchased through ChatGPT e-commerce integrations and ads – something CEO Sam Altman initially dismissed but now is considering. 

Automated e-commerce could be a thing, someday. Stranger things have happened. Ad support, however, has proven difficult for rival Perplexity, which recently paused accepting new advertisers to rethink its revenue plan.

OpenAI’s platforms account for about 80 percent of all web traffic for generative AI tools, representing 190 million of the 240 million average daily visits, according to SimilarWeb data [PDF] published in May.

OpenAI’s path to profitability is easier said than done – make a product so compelling that people will pay for it. We’re not there yet. ®

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