OpenAI makes money in four ways: ChatGPT subscriptions, pay-per-use API access for developers and enterprises, advertising on ChatGPT’s Free and Go plans, and commerce inside ChatGPT. By its CFO’s account, annualized revenue passed $20 billion in 2025. A share of that revenue goes to Microsoft, a major OpenAI shareholder, under a revenue-share agreement that runs through 2030.
Individuals can stay on Free or pay for Go, Plus or Pro; organisations buy Business or Enterprise seats, priced per user per month or under annual contracts.
02
The API platform
Developers and companies build OpenAI models into their own products and pay by usage, so revenue grows with the workloads they run.
03
Advertising
Labelled ads appear in ChatGPT's Free and Go plans while people explore and compare options. Paid Plus, Pro and Enterprise plans stay ad-free.
04
Commerce
People can buy from merchants inside ChatGPT. Stripe runs Instant Checkout and co-developed the Agentic Commerce Protocol with OpenAI, launched in September 2025.
What changed in 2025-26
Revenue passed $20 billion a year
OpenAI’s CFO wrote in January 2026 that annualized revenue rose from $2 billion in 2023 to $6 billion in 2024 and more than $20 billion in 2025, and that more compute would have meant faster growth.
Ads reached 89 countries
On 21 October 2026 OpenAI said more than 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT each week and that over 100,000 advertisers had run campaigns since ads launched just over eight months earlier.
The Microsoft terms were rewritten
Under the amended agreement of 27 April 2026, Microsoft no longer pays a revenue share to OpenAI, while OpenAI’s payments to Microsoft continue through 2030 at the same percentage, subject to a total cap. Microsoft’s fiscal 2026 10-K records $24.1 billion of revenue from OpenAI, including revenue-sharing payments.
Distribution beyond Azure
OpenAI can now serve all its products on any cloud. Its models and Codex are coming to Google Cloud (announced 21 October 2026).
OpenAI's revenue streams
ChatGPT Go, Plus, Pro
How it is chargedMonthly subscription per individual
How it is chargedUsage-based, tied to production workloads
SourceOpenAI CFO post, January 2026
ChatGPT Ads
How it is chargedAdvertisers buy through partners or self-serve Ads Manager
SourceOpenAI, 21 October 2026
Instant Checkout
How it is chargedMerchants sell inside ChatGPT via Stripe
SourceStripe, 29 September 2025
What it means for you
Pick the plan by use: Go for longer everyday use (it may show ads), Plus or Pro for heavier work without ads, Business or Enterprise for teams.
If you advertise online, test ChatGPT Ads where they are available and measure them against search ads.
If you sell products, check whether your catalogue can be bought through checkout in ChatGPT.
If you build on the API, model your costs per token and plan for price changes as new models ship.
When you read OpenAI revenue numbers, check who published them: company posts, Microsoft filings and press reports are not the same thing.
The Business Engineer lens
OpenAI earns from the same intelligence in four ways at once: seats, tokens, attention and transactions. The Business Engineer view is that ads and checkout turn ChatGPT’s free users from a cost into a revenue base, which matters because revenue is capped by how much compute OpenAI can buy.
The complete explainer, cleaned up and reformatted for mobile.
OpenAI has built the foundational layer of the AI industry. With large generative models like GPT-3 and DALL-E, OpenAI offers API access to businesses that want to develop applications on top of its foundational models while being able to plug these models into their products and customize these models with proprietary data and additional AI features. On the other hand, OpenAI also released ChatGPT — as explored in the intelligence factory race between AI labs — , developing around a freemium model. Microsoft also commercializes opener products through its commercial partnership.
Drawing by The Business Engineer.
How much does OpenAI make today?
OpenAI’s CFO wrote in January 2026 that annualized revenue rose from $2 billion in 2023 to $6 billion in 2024 and more than $20 billion in 2025. Back in 2022 the company projected a billion in revenues by 2024, and according to Form 990, which is IRS’ primary tool for gathering information about tax-exempt organizations, OpenAI reported a $3.48 million in revenues in 2020.
Source propublica.org
OpenAI APIs
OpenAI monetized its generative models through its APIs, which can be accessed by any business to build new applications on top of these APIs.
As explained, the three layers of AI, the middle layer of AI, and the business applications layer of AI are leveraging these APIs to build verticalized engines that can perform specific functions much better than a generalized engine like GPT-3.
And on the other hand, the business applications layer can leverage the APIs to make any app smarter via AI.
Examples of how OpenAI’s APIs have been used so far at the consumer applications level comprise tools and products like GitHub Copilot and more.
ChatGPT
With the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI has expanded its consumer reach for its family of GPT models.
Indeed, pre-ChatGPT, these models could be used either via the OpenAI site or as small applications which were available through the site.
Yet, those were primarily a way to showcase the capabilities of OpenAI APIs.
Indeed, ChatGPT has reached millions of users since its launch, and it’s now becoming a tool, like Google, that has captured the imagination of hundreds of millions of users.
ChatGPT leverages GPT underlying models, yet, it also uses InstructGPT models, as a way, via humans-in-the-loop, to fine-tune the capabilities of the conversational interface to get better at handling complex conversations and interactions.
ChatGPT works a premium model, where the tool has been opened for paid users at a $20/mo plan.
InstructGPT is the successor to the GPT-3 large language model (LLM) developed by OpenAI.
ChatGPT Premium
ChatGPT is available as a premium version that can be accessed for $20/mo, enabling the user to get a faster version that performs better.
The functionalities are the same as the free version; what changes is speed, performance, and ability to have tasks completed with more tokens, compared to the free version, which might stop after a specific token request.
For instance, in the free version, if you ask ChatGPT to formulate a very long essay, that might stop at a certain point, whereas in the premium one, it should have no specific limits.
ChatGPT APIs
ChatGPT was also launched as an API endpoint.
Meaning it can be integrated via its APIs into any web application.
The ChatGPT model family we are releasing today, gpt-3.5-turbo, is the same model used in the ChatGPT product. It is priced at $0.002 per 1k tokens, which is 10x cheaper than our existing GPT-3.5 models. It’s also our best model for many non-chat use cases—we’ve seen early testers migrate from text-davinci-003 to gpt-3.5-turbo with only a small amount of adjustment needed to their prompts.
As OpenAI explains in its documentation, ChatGPT is powered by gpt-3.5-turbo, OpenAI’s most advanced language model.
Using the OpenAI API, you can build your applications with gpt-3.5-turbo to do things like:
Draft an email or other piece of writing
Write Python code
Answer questions about a set of documents
Create conversational agents
Give your software a natural language interface
Tutor in a range of subjects
Translate languages
Simulate characters for video games and much more
Foundry
OpenAI launched an enterprise service called Foundry, which is simply an expansion of the API service, but for enterprise clients to enable them to have a more solid infrastructure — as explored in the economics of AI compute infrastructure — with a broader volume.
As explained by TechCrunch a lightweight version of GPT-3.5 will cost $78,000 for a three-month commitment or $264,000 over a one-year commitment.
OpenAI/Microsoft
OpenAI and Microsoft partnered up from a commercial standpoint. The history of the partnership started in 2016 and consolidated in 2019, with Microsoft investing a billion dollars into the partnership. Microsoft’s total funding commitments reached $13.0 billion, of which $11.9 billion was funded as of 30 June 2026. Microsoft, through OpenAI, is developing its Azure AI Supercomputer while enhancing its Azure Enterprise Platform and integrating OpenAI’s models into its business and consumer products (GitHub, Office, Bing).
The terms have since been rewritten twice. In October 2025 OpenAI contracted to buy an incremental $250 billion of Azure services and Microsoft gave up its right of first refusal on compute. Under the amended agreement of 27 April 2026, OpenAI can serve all its products on any cloud, Microsoft’s licence to OpenAI IP through 2032 is non-exclusive, and OpenAI’s revenue-share payments to Microsoft continue through 2030, subject to a total cap.
Microsoft was the main investor in the OpenAI LP, the capped-profit entity created in 2019; since the October 2025 recapitalization it holds about 25 percent of OpenAI Group PBC on an as-converted basis (Microsoft 10-K, fiscal 2026).
In 2019, the partnership strengthened, with Microsoft putting a billion dollars into the partnership.
Today, Azure is among the top players in the cloud industry, together with Amazon AWS.
In the last decade, cloud providers have enabled hundreds of startups. It’s not a secret that AWS, by the early 2010s, empowered a class of startups that later became prominent tech companies (Netflix, Uber, Slack and many others).
Yet, from the 2020s, in the future, the cloud industry playfield has changed, and it’s skewed toward AI.
In other words, large generative models, like GPT-3 and forward, to be released in the first place, need a huge amount of computational power, which today can be provided only by a few players.
Differentiating a cloud business to become the underlying infrastructure for AI is a critical component to ensure the cloud offering doesn’t get commoditized over time.
In fact, cloud players like Microsoft and Amazon have enjoyed high-profit margins in the last years, thanks to the lack of competition and their massive infrastructure.
Yet, in the next decade, with AI models taking over the world, cloud computing might get commoditized.
Unless you develop it around AI. Which is what Microsoft is doing via its Azure AI Supercomputing technology.
In other words, the partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft, since 2016, has given Microsoft Azure’s team an important sight into how to build supercomputers that could help AI companies to build custom AI models.
This is the first key strategic advantage that Microsoft has gained from its partnership with OpenAI.
The development of its cloud AI infrastructure.
Microsoft Azure Enterprise Platform
In addition to that, Microsoft Azure is integrating all OpenAI’s products within its business and enterprise platform.
This integration enables Azure to become the go-to enterpriseplatform for the development of custom AI models, which can be integrated into the workflow of any business.
Integration into Microsoft Business And Consumer Applications
Another key benefit of the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI is the integration of these AI models within Microsoft’s business and consumer applications products.
Some examples comprise the release of GitHub Copilot, an AI-based tool to write code much faster by leveraging GPT-3.
Or the fact that Microsoft is looking into ways to integrate these AI models within its other products, like Bing and Office.
Another large bet Microsoft might make is about integrating these AI models within its AR interfaces (HoloLens) as general-purpose assistants that can make those devices much more valuable.
The AI App Store?
By combining AI as an interface with a hardware device like HoloLens, and an operating system, like Windows Holographic OS, Microsoft and OpenAI might come up with the next App Store for AR?
How does OpenAI corporate and organizational structure work?
The 2019 structure shown here (a nonprofit general partner over the capped-profit OpenAI LP) was replaced on 28 October 2025: the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation now controls OpenAI Group PBC, a public benefit corporation, and appoints its board.
Key Highlights
OpenAI’s Foundational Role in AI Industry:
OpenAI has developed large generative models like GPT-3 and DALL-E.
These models are made accessible through APIs, enabling businesses to build applications on top of them.
OpenAI allows customization of these models with proprietary data and additional AI features.
Revenue and Financials:
OpenAI’s CFO said annualized revenue was more than $20 billion in 2025 (company figure, January 2026).
Annualized revenue was $6 billion in 2024, per OpenAI’s CFO.
OpenAI APIs:
OpenAI offers APIs for businesses to integrate generative models into various applications.
These APIs serve as the foundational layer for creating verticalized AI engines and enhancing consumer applications.
ChatGPT:
ChatGPT expanded OpenAI’s consumer reach, shifting its model from primarily B2B to a consumer-focused approach.
Millions of users have engaged with ChatGPT.
It leverages both GPT and InstructGPT models to handle complex conversations.
ChatGPT Premium:
ChatGPT is available in a premium version for $20/mo, offering better speed and performance.
The premium version allows tasks to be completed with more tokens compared to the free version.
ChatGPT APIs:
ChatGPT APIs, powered by gpt-3.5-turbo, enable integration into web applications.
Pricing is $0.002 per 1k tokens, making it more cost-effective.
OpenAI Foundry:
OpenAI’s enterprise service Foundry extends the API service to enterprise clients.
Foundry offers a range of pricing options based on commitment length.
OpenAI and Microsoft Partnership:
Microsoft invested in OpenAI and became a commercial partner.
Microsoft Azure AI Supercomputer was developed as a result of this partnership.
Azure integrates OpenAI’s products and models, strengthening its AI infrastructure.
OpenAI’s models are integrated into Microsoft’s business and consumer products.
Corporate Structure:
Since 28 October 2025 the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation controls OpenAI Group PBC, a public benefit corporation.
The Foundation appoints and removes the PBC’s directors.
Employees, investors, the Foundation and Microsoft (about 25 percent as-converted, fiscal 2026) hold the equity.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
