ChatGPT's subscribers and revenue soar in 2025 – here's why

Since OpenAI’s ChatGPT triggered an AI arms race in 2022, most tech companies have released their own chatbots. Despite the highly saturated market, OpenAI has continually released features to keep its competitive edge — a strategy that seems to be working. 

 A new report from The Information found that ChatGPT’s revenue soared in the past three months, with the company generating “at least $415 million per month,” reflecting a 30% increase in revenue in only three months. According to the report, this growth can be attributed to a significant increase in subscribers, with the company adding 4.5 million paying subscribers since the end of 2024. 

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Over the last year, OpenAI has released several updates that make an OpenAI subscription more enticing. These include access to Sora, its state-of-the-art video generation model, and the screen-sharing and visual capabilities in ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode. , Both features were released in December and are limited to subscribers. 

Most recently, OpenAI unveiled its new image GPT-4o image-generation model, which boasts significant improvements over the DALL-E model that previously lived in the chatbot. Capabilities of the latest model include tackling difficult prompts, such as realistic people and, most impressively, accurate text. 

At launch, the GPT-4o image-generation model was announced to be available to all users, including free ones, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced a day later that the rollout to the free tier would now be “delayed for a while,” only to make it available again to free users with a three-image-per-day cap a week later. 

As people rushed to try the viral image generator, Altman shared — a couple of days after it was released —  that the company added one million users within an hour. 

This growth has posed its own challenges for the company. On Tuesday, Altman warned users via an X post to be patient as the company delays new releases, products break, and slow service ensues due to capacity challenges. Particularly, it seems the company is facing issues allocating the right amount of computing to power this growth and features, with Altman following up that post by calling out anyone who may have “GPU capacity in 100k chunks.” 

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OpenAI has made clear that it has no plans to slow its momentum. The company’s ultimate goal is to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the term for AI with autonomous human-level intelligence. Until now, AGI has been a North Star for AI research, and it remains a distant concept. However, working toward such an ambitious goal has accelerated OpenAI’s developments and helped it secure its lead among competitors such as Microsoft, which have taken a different approach.

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