OpenAI executives said Monday that the majority of the company’s revenue comes from consumer subscriptions, primarily through its paid ChatGPT service. 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 grow its enterprise business with services such as ChatGPT Enterprise and ChatGPT Team. Still, the company’s consumer base keeps its revenue mainstream by providing additional incentives to users. For example, the entry-level ChatGPT Plus plan, which starts at $20 per month, includes DALL-E image generation, higher usage limits, and access to a variety of AI models in addition to initial features.
“We’ve been surprised by the pace of growth, especially on the consumer side,” Frier said in an interview. “Even our enterprise business, although still young, is already generating incredible annual revenue. We’re really excited about the potential there.”
He added that the company has about 250 million weekly active users and converts free customers into paying customers at a rate of 5% to 6%. In September, OpenAI announced that the enterprise version of ChatGPT had reached a milestone of 1 million paid users.
However, OpenAI still faces high costs from developing and operating advanced AI systems. The company recently secured $6.6 billion in funding and a $4 billion line of credit to support its infrastructure plans, including building a large data center to power its data-intensive AI models. did.
At the same time, OpenAI continues to dominate the competitive generative AI landscape. The number of visitors more than doubled in September 2024 to a record 3.1 billion, according to researcher SimilarWeb. That makes ChatGPT the 11th most trafficked website in the world, but it’s still far behind Google.com with 82 billion visits and YouTube.com with 28 billion.
But in the chatbot market, ChatGPT’s closest U.S. competitor is Microsoft’s Bing.com, which had less than 2 billion visitors in September. According to Samelweb, Google’s Gemini is the third most visited chatbot with 274.7 million visits.
