①After the monthly active users of ChatGPT exceeded 200 million last week, the commercial subscription users of OpenAI have also exceeded 1 million; ②The commercial ChatGPT is more expensive than personal subscriptions, costing around $25-60 per month, but it also provides more services; ③With the continuous surge in the number of users, there were also quite astonishing rumors of price hikes on Thursday.
Caixin reported on September 6th (Editor Shi Zhengcheng) that although the frequency of global artificial intelligence leader OpenAI's release of amazing new products has greatly decreased this year, it has not hindered the company's rapid progress in the aspect of fundraising.
OpenAI stated on Thursday that the number of paid users for the enterprise version of ChatGPT subscription service, launched a year ago, has now exceeded 1 million. This includes the Enterprise service for medium and large enterprises, Team subscriptions for small teams, and ChatGPT Edu products tailored for universities.
Unlike the $20 monthly subscription fee for individual users, corporate users are charged higher fees, and OpenAI also provides value-added services such as privacy protection, unlimited high-speed model access, longer context window, and on-site training.
According to the official website pricing and relevant reports, the cost of Team subscription is $30 per person per month, the price of Enterprise service is not publicly available, but each account generally has to pay around $50-60 per month. In other words, a 1,000-person enterprise now has to pay up to $7.2 million in annual subscription fees to OpenAI.
Previously in April, OpenAI disclosed that the number of commercial subscription users exceeded 600,000. However, considering the release of the special product for universities in May, it is currently unclear how many new enterprise users have been added in the past 5 months. Logically, a university may purchase far more accounts than a startup company, but the unit price of education services will be significantly lower.
In this regard, OpenAI provides very little information, only mentioning that half of the commercial users are in the USA, and the largest number of commercial users in overseas markets are in Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
Significant leader effect.
Similar to the trend of the increasing number of commercial users, OpenAI's number of individual users has also nearly doubled.
In the current situation where various competitors are launching similar subscription services, this momentum shows that users hold an attitude of "only buying the best products".
The company announced last week that the weekly active users of ChatGPT have exceeded 0.2 billion people, just over 0.1 billion at the end of last year. A company spokesperson revealed that since the faster responding GPT-4o mini was launched in July, the usage of the automated application programming interface (API) has doubled.
Commercial success is further driving up the valuation: media reported last week that OpenAI is advancing a new round of financing, with a corresponding valuation that may exceed $100 billion.
So... considering raising prices?
Coincidentally, media reported on Thursday that OpenAI is considering taking advantage of the momentum of launching more powerful models to raise prices.
According to the Information, citing insiders, OpenAI is considering setting a higher price for the upcoming reasoning specialization "Strawberry" large model, or the next generation flagship model Orion in internal discussions. Moreover, in the "early internal discussions", the subscription price could even reach as high as $2000 per month!
Of course, the journalist who wrote the article also emphasized strong doubts that OpenAI would set such a high price. In comparison, the current cost for ChatGPT Plus per month is $20.
Editor/Somer