AI OpenAI, a leading company in the trend, recently predicted that in five years, its chatbots will... ChatGPT's paid subscriber base will grow to over 220 million, with annual revenue approaching $200 billion.
Will ChatGPT become one of the world's largest subscription services?
Currently, OpenAI offers ChatGPT as a paid service, with "Plus" and "Pro" plans priced at $20 and $200 per month, respectively.
As of July this year, ChatGPT had approximately 35 million paying users, representing about 5% of ChatGPT's weekly active user base (approximately 700 million).
According to the report, OpenAI expects the product to have 2.6 billion weekly active users by 2030, with 8.5% (approximately 220 million) converting into paid subscribers, making ChatGPT one of the world's largest subscription businesses.
In addition, OpenAI expects that by 2030, about 20% of its revenue will come from new features such as shopping and advertising.
This week, the company launched a personal shopping assistant for ChatGPT ahead of the Thanksgiving shopping season, generating revenue through advertising or commission sales. This move could pave the way for OpenAI to achieve commercial profitability.
Still facing huge losses
According to sources, OpenAI's annualized revenue is expected to reach approximately $20 billion by the end of this year, but the company is also facing increasing losses.
In September of this year, it was reported that OpenAI's revenue for the first half of 2025 was approximately $4.3 billion, about 16% higher than its total revenue for the previous year. However, the company's huge losses have not yet been reversed.
According to Microsoft The recently released third-quarter financial report shows that Microsoft 's equity method investment in OpenAI reduced net profit by $3.1 billion. Based on Microsoft 's approximately 27% stake in OpenAI, OpenAI's net loss in the third quarter was estimated at approximately $11.5 billion. If calculated based on pre-tax losses and an actual shareholding ratio of 32.5%, the loss could exceed $12 billion—nearly three times its first-half revenue of $4.3 billion.
In addition, another concern about OpenAI is that its ChatGPT is not without rivals in the field of AI chatbots . For example, Google has recently launched a strong counterattack with its upgraded Gemini 3 model.
Meanwhile, data shows that ChatGPT's user growth rate has fluctuated recently, and the company is also facing issues such as declining user engagement time and active user numbers due to content restrictions. According to sources, OpenAI's weekly active users increased by 42% month-over-month in January, but by September, this month-over-month growth rate had slowed to 13%.
(Article source: CLS)
