OpenAI leans into ads and tiered pricing

OpenAI is starting to look less like a single subscription app and more like a full consumer internet business. In the span of about two weeks, its ad pilot reportedly crossed $100 million in annualised revenue, and on April 9 it added a new $100-a-month ChatGPT tier between the $20 Plus plan and the $200 Pro plan. (cnbc.com) (community.openai.com) The advertising side is moving fast enough that OpenAI told investors it could reach $2.5 billion in ad revenue in 2026 and $100 billion a year by 2030. Axios reported those projections were tied to a forecast of 2.75 billion weekly users across OpenAI products by 2030. (axios.com) (money.usnews.com) That is a very different business model from the one OpenAI talked about in its early ChatGPT years, when the focus was subscriptions and application programming interface access. Advertising means the free version is no longer just a funnel for paid plans; it becomes inventory that can be sold to brands. (cnbc.com) (axios.com) The new $100 plan shows the other half of the strategy. OpenAI said the tier is aimed at heavier users of Codex, its coding agent inside ChatGPT, and gives 5 times more Codex usage than the $20 Plus plan while keeping access to the broader Pro feature set. (community.openai.com) (techcrunch.com) Codex is the part of ChatGPT built for software work, so this price change is less about casual chatting and more about people who spend hours generating, editing, and testing code. Business Today reported Codex had reached 3 million weekly users when OpenAI rolled out the new middle tier. (businesstoday.in) (community.openai.com) The gap OpenAI was trying to close was unusually wide. Its official pricing page listed Plus at $20 a month and Pro at $200 a month, which left power users with a 10-times jump if they hit limits but did not need the most expensive package. (openai.com) (engadget.com) Competitors were already sitting in that middle ground. TechCrunch and Engadget both reported OpenAI framed the $100 tier as a direct answer to Anthropic’s similarly priced Claude coding offer, which had become a reference point for developers who buy these tools like they buy cloud software. (techcrunch.com) (engadget.com) Put those two moves together and the shape of the company changes. Free users can be monetised through ads, steady individual users can stay on $20 Plus, heavier coding users can move to $100, and the top-end $200 plan remains for people who want the highest limits. (openai.com) (community.openai.com) (axios.com) That matters because artificial intelligence is expensive in two different ways at once. Training new models burns capital up front, and serving millions of daily prompts burns money continuously, so a company with hundreds of millions of users has a strong reason to charge different groups different prices while also looking for advertising revenue at scale. (axios.com) (openai.com) OpenAI is not just selling one premium chatbot anymore. It is building the same ladder that shaped search engines, video platforms, and streaming services: free at the bottom, several paid rungs in the middle, and a much larger bet that attention itself can become the biggest product. (cnbc.com) (axios.com)