If you want the smartest AI and the most features from ChatGPT, you can currently pay $20 (about £15 / AU$29) a month to OpenAI for ChatGPT Plus – but that subscription fee could more than double over the next five years.
That’s according to a report from the New York Times, apparently based on internal company documents from OpenAI. The first price bump, an extra $2 a month, is tipped to be coming before the end of 2024.
After that, we can expect OpenAI to “aggressively raise” the cost of ChatGPT Plus to $44 (about £33 / AU$64) a month by 2029. There are currently around 10 million people paying for ChatGPT Plus, the NYT report says.
We’re now well used to digital subscription services bumping up their prices every so often, and it seems ChatGPT Plus is going to be no different in that regard – though there may well be new features and new AI models alongside the price increases.
‘Burning through piles of money’
The main reason for the projected price hike for ChatGPT Plus is clear: powering the AI service costs a lot. The new report says OpenAI is “burning through piles of money”, and is on course to lose $5 billion across the course of 2024.
While monthly revenue is now up to $300 million, and annual sales are expected to be $3.7 billion this year (and $11.6 billion next year), OpenAI remains very firmly in the red, as per the documents that the NYT has managed to gain access to.
Behind the scenes, OpenAI is looking to raise around $7 billion in outside funding, which would value the company at a cool $150 billion – around the level of a Goldman Sachs, an Uber, or an AT&T. There continues to be turbulence behind the scenes though, with three executives quitting the company in the last week.
None of this necessarily affects end users though – at least not until the price rises start. In recent days, OpenAI has pushed out improvements to the ChatGPT 4o-mini model, and rolled out the chatbot’s Advanced Voice mode to more users.