OpenAI CFO: Paid ChatGPT Subscriptions Make Up Most of Our Business

An OpenAI executive said Monday that the majority of the company's revenue comes from consumer subscriptions, primarily through its paid ChatGPT services. CFO Sarah Friar told Bloomberg TV that about 75% of the company's overall business comes from consumer subscriptions.

Her remarks come as OpenAI continues to expand its enterprise business with services including ChatGPT Enterprise and ChatGPT Team. Still, its consumer base remains the main stream of revenue by offering users extra incentives. For example, its entry-level ChatGPT Plus plan, which starts at $20 per month, includes access to various AI models, along with DALL-E image generation, higher usage limits and early features. 

"We have been wowed at just the pace of growth, particularly on the consumer side," Friar said in the interview. "Even our enterprise businesses, they are young, but they are already doing an incredible amount of annualized revenue. We're really excited by the potential there."

She added that the company has about 250 million weekly active users and is converting free customers into paying ones at a rate of 5% to 6%. In September, OpenAI revealed it had reached a milestone of 1 million paid users for enterprise versions of ChatGPT.

However, OpenAI continues to face high costs due to the development and operation of advanced AI systems. It recently secured $6.6 billion in funding and a $4 billion line of credit to support its infrastructure plans, which include building large data centers to power its data-hungry AI models.

At the same time, OpenAI continues to dominate the competitive generative AI landscape. Visits more than doubled in September 2024 to a record 3.1 billion visits, according to researcher Similarweb. That makes ChatGPT the No. 11 website by worldwide traffic – yet still a far cry from Google.com, with 82 billion visits, or YouTube.com, with 28 billion.

In the chatbot market, however, ChatGPT's closest US competitor is Microsoft's Bing.com, which had under 2 billion visits in September. Google's Gemini was the third most-visited chatbot, with 274.7 million visits, according to Similarweb.