What ChatGPT Go Really Means

Today, OpenAI released ChatGPT Go, a new $4.60 version of ChatGPT. The catch? You probably can’t use it.

The new system offers more capabilities than the company’s free tier, but is so far available only in India. However, it signals several things that have big implications for the future of OpenAI.

Here’s my video breaking them down. You can watch here or on YouTube.

Basically, this is way more than a cheap ChatGPT plan for a lower-income country. It signals two important things: that OpenAI is getting increasingly price-sensitive, and that the company’s new GPT-5 is far cheaper to operate than the previous o3 model.

Before, when OpenAI had a new technology, they would often have given free users fairly extensive access, and then made the tech unlimited or nearly unlimited for Plus users.

The company wanted to gain market share, and was willing to lose massive amounts of money on too-low-priced plans with too-high capabilities in order to do so. The playbook was very similar to Uber in 2014, or Amazon in the early ‘00s

Now, though, OpenAI is running low on GPUs. It simply can’t afford to keep giving away so much computing power—especially when it has enterprise users paying massive sums for access to its APIs and burning through its resources faster than ever.

As a result, the company is becoming more price sensitive.

ChatGPT Go feels like an attempt to wring more cash out of OpenAI’s second largest market, India. With annual salaries much lower than the US, many users in India likely use the Free plan, but would find the $20 per month Plus plan too expensive.

OpenAI probably want to use ChatGPT Go as a way to offer a middle ground, where they can better monetize this audience and offset their costs, without pricing themselves out of and sending users to cheaper competitors like Deepseek.

Expect the Free version of ChatGPT to soon get less capable in countries where ChatGPT Go is offered, and for capacity cuts to the Free and perhaps even Plus versions to happen more often in countries outside India as OpenAI conserves its resources.

Secondly, ChatGPT Go’s reliance on GPT-5 likely indicates that that model is far cheaper to run than previous models like o3. OpenAI likely thinks GPT-5 is cheap enough that they can ultimately turn a profit by offering it to certain users, even at a lower price point.

If GPT-5 is far cheaper to run, that’s likely to push OpenAI’s earnings higher across the world and take it a little closer to future profitability—if the company can survive the backlash against the new model (more on that very soon!)

Full analysis of ChatGPT Go is here.