Despite costing users $200 per month, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro plan is actually losing the company money, according to a recent tweet fired off by CEO Sam Altman.
The plan offers users near-unlimited access to the company’s latest models and features, and its popularity appears to be the culprit of these losses, with Altman explaining that “people use it much more than we expected”.
However, despite still struggling to remain profitable, OpenAI is committed to drumming up revenue through a variety of methods – including hiking the prices of its most popular plans.
OpenAI’s New ChatGPT Pro Plan Is Losing The Company Money
OpenAI’s highly anticipated ChatGPT Pro plan was launched in December of last year. The tier provides access to an upgraded version of OpenAI’s o1 AI model – o1 Pro mode – and lifts rate limits on a range of the company’s AI tools including its video generator, Sora.
insane thing: we are currently losing money on openai pro subscriptions!
people use it much more than we expected.
— Sam Altman (@sama) January 6, 2025
Its $200 per month price tag was determined personally by Sam Altman, as the CEO thought it would be high enough to draw some much-needed revenue into the company. Yet, despite costing considerably more than its $20 per month Plus plan, Altman revealed that GPT Pro is still losing the company money because people are using it at a much higher rate than the company expected.
OpenAI Plans For a New For-Profit Structure
Despite being one of the fastest-growing companies in Silicon Valley and raising over $20 billion since its founding, OpenAI has always struggled to generate profits.
Even after attracting over $3.7 billion in revenue last year, the company expected losses of around $5 billion due to expenditures like employee salaries, office rent, and the costs involved with training and running the AI models ChatGPT depend upon – with the chatbot costing an eye-watering $700,000 a day during certain periods.
However, as OpenAI’s financial woes mount and the company admits it needs “more capital than it imagined”, it plans to switch to a for-profit business model to recover some losses.
This corporate restructuring effort will see OpenAI create new strategic partnerships, potentially introduce ads to its free tier, and likely hike the price of its paid subscriptions. By taking these measures, the San Francisco company projects its revenue will reach a massive $100 billion by 2029.
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Is It Time to Find a ChatGPT Alternative?
If ChatGPT’s potential pricing markup concerns you, the good news is there is a wealth of AI chatbots that offer just about every feature you’ll find in the trailblazing tool.
For instance, just like ChatGPT, Google Gemini is capable of advanced conversation learning, image generation, and retrieving up-to-date info from the web. After testing the two chatbots side by side, we also found Gemini to be slightly easier to use, and more conversational, making it the preferable choice for those wanting to brainstorm ideas.
What’s more, Gemini’s priciest package currently matches the price of ChatGPT Plus ($20 per month) and Google isn’t expected to raise its price anytime soon, making it a safer bet for users looking to keep costs down in the long term.
However, with ChatGPT offering better logical reasoning, SEO, and research capabilities than most of its competitors, and its Pro plan essentially giving users unfettered access to its feature catalog, it will still remain the obvious choice for many users – even if it requires them to fork out over $200 a month for the privilege.
