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0 pointsparliament322mo ago0 comments

"Near billion users", yet less than 5% pay them a single penny[1]. Like you said, the vast majority of these will never pay anything, but I'd argue the majority will migrate to the "next" free provider as soon as OpenAI starts inserting too many ads into the product.

I watched my partner switch from OAI to DeepSeek during the last outage and she hasn't been back to OAI since. I am skeptical there is any actual stickyness when basically all of the chatbots do the same thing for the casual user.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/15/openais_chatgpt_popul...

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nfm2mo ago

Google Search has no stickiness and they managed to build a behemoth.

ChatGPT is a great product, but the lack of stickiness comes into play because there are many viable alternatives.

They’re all going to have to monetise the consumer segment at some stage, and I think that’s likely to be via ads on a freemium tier in most instances.

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Esophagus42mo ago

You say 5% of users pay like it’s a shockingly bad number, but that’s almost exactly the same as YouTube’s paid subscribers (125m) vs MAUs (2.5b).

Like it or not, OpenAI is building a real business. It’s obviously capital intensive, but we will see how it goes.

And no, the vast majority will not migrate. Just like the vast majority didn’t migrate away from Google after they launched ads.

I don’t get the HN urge to be the contrarian saying “that’ll never work.”

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