The Information: ChatGPT's paid users exceed 20 million, OpenAI's annual revenue reaches US$5 billion

ChatGPT has more than 20 million paying users, and its annualized revenue has increased by 30% in three months. The media pointed out that if OpenAI maintains this growth rate, OpenAI's annual revenue in 2025 is expected to hit $12.7 billion. In addition, with the acceleration of competitors such as Grok, Gemini, and Claude, the AI ​​chat market is moving from a monopoly to a melee among many players.

OpenAI's users and revenue are skyrocketing.

According to The Information, on April 1, Eastern Time, the number of paid users of ChatGPT has exceeded 20 million, an increase of nearly 30% from 15.5 million at the end of last year. Users are willing to pay to subscribe to this AI that can write code, write articles, give health advice, and help with financial planning.

How much revenue do users bring to OpenAI?

The media pointed out that based on subscriptions, ChatGPT currently earns at least $415 million per month, with an annualized revenue of up to $5 billion. This data is an increase of nearly 30% compared to the monthly revenue of 333 million and annualized revenue of 4 billion at the end of last year.

But ChatGPT's actual revenue may be higher. In addition to the most basic subscription such as ChatGPT Plus, which costs $20 per month, there are many enterprise-level users who purchase the high-priced Pro package at $200 per month.

It is worth noting that in addition to ChatGPT subscription revenue, OpenAI's revenue also comes from a large number of developers and platforms that call OpenAI models through APIs. OpenAI has previously estimated that the API business can bring in approximately US$2 billion in revenue this year.

If OpenAI maintains this growth rate, its full-year revenue in 2025 is expected to hit $12.7 billion, far higher than the $4 billion in 2024.

Although ChatGPT's user base is growing and the total number of users is growing faster than revenue, the payment rate is declining. OpenAI said on Monday that its current weekly active users are 500 million, a 43% increase from 350 million at the end of last year. However, because free users are also soaring, the proportion of paying users has dropped from 5% three months ago to 4% now.

In addition, OpenAI announced on Monday that it will raise $40 billion at a pre-investment valuation of $260 billion. Because it costs a lot of money to buy computing power and serve free users, although OpenAI is still losing money, OpenAI predicted in October last year that it would take at least five years (until 2029) for the company to be truly profitable.

Rivals are coming in full force, and competition in the second tier is fierce

Although OpenAI's ChatGPT was undoubtedly the king in the battlefield of AI chat applications, its opponents are quietly catching up.

Data from Similarweb and Sensor Tower show that products from “AI rising stars” such as Gemini, Claude, and Grok are rapidly grabbing users’ attention.

In March, Google Gemini had an average daily visit volume of 10.9 million, a month-on-month increase of 7.4%. Microsoft Copilot had an average daily visit volume of 2.4 million, a month-on-month increase of 2.1%. Anthropic's Claude had an average daily visit volume of 3.3 million. Musk's xAI's Grok traffic surged by nearly 800% month-on-month, catching up with DeepSeek's 16.5 million daily visits.

Grok, in particular, has become the dark horse with the fastest traffic growth thanks to Musk's endorsement and X platform integration advantages. However, these are still small compared to ChatGPT data, which had 500 million weekly active users at the end of March. Similarweb pointed out that the competition for the second place in chatbots is very fierce.

The performance of mobile terminals (app downloads + usage) is also fierce. According to analysts, the number of app users of AI chatbots is also soaring, partly due to the frequent updates of AI models in recent times. Sensor Tower data shows that in the week of February 24, after Claude released a new model Claude 3.7 Sonnet, the weekly active users of the app soared by 21% month-on-month. After Gemini launched the 2.0 Flash model, the weekly active users soared by 42%.