OpenAI is in trouble. More than beforeeven. In The Information indicate that internal projections for subscribers in 2026 are worrying. The users of ChatGPT Plustheir $20 a month plan, will fall from 44 million in 2025 to just 9 million this year. That represents a drop of 80%, and they want to compensate for it with their affordable subscription. It’s not clear that plan can work.
ChatGPT Go as a lifesaver. What OpenAI is going to lose with ChatGPT Plus according to these internal forecasts, they want to counteract with an extraordinary increase in subscriptions to ChatGPT Gothe ad-supported plan that costs between $5 and $8. The company’s objective is for this plan to go from having the current 3 million subscribers to 112 million, an increase of 3,600% in twelve months.
A terrible quarter. While The Information showed these forecasts, in The Wall Street Journal they informed OpenAI does not have the accounts in this first quarter of 2026. The company has not achieved the expected income, and has not achieved the user acquisition figure that it had projected. OpenAI CFO Sarah Frier has warned that the company may not be able to pay for its future computing contracts if revenue doesn’t start growing immediately.
The accounts do not come out. OpenAI has contracted close to $600 billion in spending on future data centers, an astronomical figure that was built with all the announcements that Sam Altman and the company made in 2025. The company expects to spend $25 billion but plans to enter $30,000, a narrow margin even if everything goes well. But according to WSJ it is not doing so, and Anthropic’s popularity has eroded its position in the market. They wanted to reach 1 billion weekly active users by the end of 2025 and they didn’t achieve it, and the decision to bet on ChatGPT Go seems like a desperate response to their revenue problem… and their IPO.
No one has ever grown so much. ChatGPT Go’s growth goal poses a colossal challenge. Achieving 109 million paying subscribers in twelve months is unprecedented. It took Facebook four years to get 100 million free users, and although ChatGPT achieved the same thing in two months and set a prodigious precedent, for this to be repeated for a paid subscription even extending the time frame to 12 months would be unusual.
But not even for those. Analyst Ed Zitron point Because even if OpenAI achieved 112 million subscribers at $5/month on average, it would earn $560 million per month. That figure is a far cry from the $880 million per month generated by the 44 million Plus subscribers at $20/month. The difference should be covered with advertisingbut that doesn’t seem to be going as well as they expected either. Until have activated pay per click adssomething that already caused the credibility of SEO to be greatly damaged.
We go public, yes or no? According to WSJ, Sarah Friar and Sam Altman disagree about whether it is advisable to go public this year given this change in the situation. Altman wants to speed it up, but Friar doesn’t think the company is ready to meet the data reporting obligations that public companies have. The problems accumulate because the financing round closed in March made OpenAI’s valuation amounted to 852,000 million dollars. If investors had known the situation of OpenAI’s first quarter, perhaps they would not have entered that round, or they would not have done so in such a notable way.
The challenge of charging $20 for AI. OpenAI’s forecast is worrying. That a company that managed to popularize generative AI can only get 9 million people around the world to pay $20 a month is disturbing and says a lot about the state of the market. On the one hand, maybe people just don’t see that $20 worth it, which is bad for the entire industry. But perhaps what people don’t see is that those 20 dollars are not worth it if they spend them on ChatGPT and they do on competitors like Claude. That is even more worrying. It is clear that there is a segment of users willing to pay such a price, but today that segment is smaller than the expectation created suggested.
The Pro plan will remain a rarity. OpenAI also has the Pro plan for $200 per month, and expects its subscribers there to also double in 2026. However, that will still not be almost anecdotal because less than 1% of the total number of users—the truly intensive ones—will opt for this alternative. It is evident that this will not be the core of OpenAI’s business at the moment, and the company seems to be clear about this. They prefer to leave the middle segment in the background, have a small premium segment and bet on massive volume at a low price with advertising.
We’ve seen this before… with Netflix. OpenAI’s strategy reminds us of the one Netflix launched with its advertising plan. Which many criticized when it was announced has become in a overwhelming success. The company has returned us to square one: we want to pay to see adssomething surprising but it works. And OpenAI seems to want to apply the same story.
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