How Does ChatGPT Make Money? Subscriptions, Seats, API, Ads and Commerce in 2026

ChatGPT makes money four ways: subscriptions, business seats, the API that developers pay for by the token, and, since February 2026, advertising. A fifth, commerce fees on purchases made inside ChatGPT, started and was then reworked. Subscriptions are still the largest line; ads are growing fastest. OpenAI does not publish audited revenue, so the totals below are reported figures, each with its source and date, and they disagree with each other more than most summaries admit.

How much money does ChatGPT make?

OpenAI reported annualized revenue of $21.4 billion at the end of 2025, topping $25 billion by the end of February 2026, according to The Information via Reuters. Full-year 2025 sales were about $13 billion against roughly $22 billion of spending, according to documents reported by the Wall Street Journal and Fortune. In September 2026 a figure near $70 billion circulated; the Financial Times then reported that September's annualized revenue was "almost $50 billion", with the higher number an attempt at a like-for-like comparison with Anthropic.

Read these with two cautions. Annualized revenue multiplies one month by twelve, so it runs ahead of what a year actually books. And OpenAI is not profitable: the same documents projected cumulative cash burn of $115 billion through 2029 and meaningful profits around 2030.

Subscriptions

The pricing page lists four consumer plans:

TechCrunch reported in February 2026 that OpenAI had 50 million paying subscribers alongside 900 million weekly users, so roughly one user in eighteen paid. OpenAI said in August that ChatGPT had passed one billion weekly active users.

Business seats

ChatGPT Business is sold per seat: $20 a month for a standard seat and $100 for a premium seat on annual billing, for teams of 2 to 200. Enterprise and Edu are priced on request. Bloomberg reported in July 2026 that OpenAI's products reach more than two million businesses. None of the business plans carry ads.

The API

Developers pay per million tokens processed, with prices on the API pricing page ranging from cents for small models to $10 in and $50 out for the largest, plus discounts for cached input. The Information projected in 2025 that 2026 revenue would split roughly $20 billion from ChatGPT and $5 billion from the API. That makes OpenAI unusual among model providers: most of its money comes from its own app, not from selling the model to others.

Advertising

OpenAI's help center dates the start precisely: "Ad testing started in the United States on February 9, 2026." Ads appear below a response for Free and Go users; Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu have none. OpenAI says "ads do not influence ChatGPT's answers" and that ads "run on separate systems from our chat model."

• May 2026: a self-serve Ads Manager opened to small and medium-sized businesses, with cost-per-click bidding.
• August 31, 2026: OpenAI said ChatGPT Ads reached a $1 billion annualized run rate "in less than 200 days," with tens of thousands of advertisers in more than 40 countries.
• September 16, 2026: Sponsored Agents went into test, letting people talk to a business's own agent after clicking an ad.
• October 2026: measurement partners and brand-suitability pilots were added.

Axios, cited by Reuters, reported an internal target of $2.5 billion in ad revenue for 2026 and $100 billion by 2030. Even at the run rate OpenAI published, ads are a small share of revenue today; the target says OpenAI expects that to change. Our ChatGPT ads cost guide and buying guide cover the advertiser side.

Commerce

In September 2025 OpenAI launched Instant Checkout with Etsy sellers and an open Agentic Commerce Protocol built with Stripe, charging merchants "a small fee." Shopify merchants were reported to pay 4 percent of sales from January 2026. In March 2026 OpenAI said the first version "did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide" and moved to merchants using their own checkout, with Walmart, Target and others connected for discovery. OpenAI has not published a take rate since.

What this means if you are building or buying in AI

• Free users are paid for by someone. With one in eighteen users paying, OpenAI added ads to fund the rest. Every consumer AI app with a free tier faces the same arithmetic; our guide to monetizing an AI chatbot app works through it.
• Ads in AI are now a revenue line. A $1 billion run rate inside a year is why the other assistants are being asked when they will follow.
• The answer-ad separation is the industry rule. OpenAI's placements are labeled and kept apart from the answer. Thrad places sponsored messages inside conversations on independent AI apps under the same rule, so advertisers can reach people beyond a single assistant. Thrad lets you run one budget across the AI apps your customers already use.