OpenAI launches Indian AI App Assault! Major launch of “India Exclusive” ChatGPT subscription for only $4.6

The Zhitong Finance App learned that OpenAI, a global leader in AI applications and developer of ChatGPT, launched the country's only subscription-based AI application product, ChatGPT Go, in the Indian market on Tuesday. This is OpenAI's new India-only AI application subscription plan, priced at only 399 rupees (about $4.57) per month. This is the company's most affordable AI subscription product so far, because OpenAI wants to deepen its presence in India, the world's second-largest market and seize more market share.

According to information, global companies, especially tech giants from Silicon Valley in the US, often provide cheaper software product subscription plans for India, a price-sensitive emerging market. The target is the country with the largest population in the world and close to 1 billion Internet users.

The plan allows Indian customers to send up to ten times more messages and generate ten times more AI text-generated images than the regular free version of ChatGPT, while also providing faster response times. As the price of AI application subscription plans for higher-level users increases, the message limit will also increase, and the performance and response time of the AI large model model will also increase.

The tech-based AI startup, which is heavily supported by US tech giant Microsoft, said in a statement that ChatGPT Go for India is designed specifically for Indian users who want to use ChatGPT's advanced AI features more widely at an affordable price and use a lot of money.

The price statement shows that the top version of ChatGPT — ChatGPT Pro — is priced at 19,900 rupees per month in India, while the subscription price for the mid-tier subscription plan ChatGPT Plus is 1,999 rupees per month.

Earlier this year, OpenAI CEO Altman (am Altman) met with the Indian government's IT minister and discussed plans to create a lower-cost AI ecosystem in the Indian market.

India is the second-largest market by OpenAI's user base, after the US market. Altman, the helm of OpenAI, recently stated that India may soon become the largest market.

Nick Turley, vice president of OpenAI and head of ChatGPT, said in a statement that compared to ChatGPT's free usage tier, the plan will increase the amount of AI chat messages, image generation, and file upload by 10 times. Turley said the ChatGPT Go plan will also implement better memory retention features to provide more personalized artificial intelligence responses.

“Making ChatGPT more affordable has always been an important demand for users! We first launched the Go subscription plan in the Indian market and will learn from the feedback before expanding to other countries,” Turley said.

From a currency conversion perspective, the Plus plan costs far more than $20 to use for Indian users when priced in local currency. The new Go plan provides a more affordable alternative to the Plus subscription plan for Indian users who really want to use ChatGPT for AI chat to generate large amounts of documents, text-based AI image generation, and file processing.

Software engineer Tibor Blaho, known for accurately leaking upcoming AI application products, has previously announced this plan and its details.

Although the company geographically restricted the program to India, the company said on its official support page it is working to expand the program to more regions.

The world's strongest unicorn with a valuation of 500 billion US dollars!

Last month, Turley noted that ChatGPT now has over 700 million weekly active users globally — far more than 500 million in March. OpenAI launched an updated version of the image generator feature for ChatGPT in March, and since then, its usage in India has continued to rise. OpenAI CEO Altman said in a recent podcast that India is the company's second-largest market. Through the Go program, the company hopes to continue to profit from it.

According to statistics from AI app analysis company AppFigures, India has been leading the way in cross-platform-based ChatGPT app downloads, contributing more than 29 million downloads in the past 90 days. However, the generative AI app only received around $3.6 million in sales from users in the country during this period.

Given its pricing, this move is likely to drive more Indian consumers to subscribe and use ChatGPT more. Other AI application companies have also taken active steps to attract users globally, particularly by trying various means to attract more than 850 million internet users in the country. Last month, Perplexity AI, a leading application focused on AI search, partnered with internet service provider Airtel to provide a free Perplexity Pro subscription service. AI Gemini, an AI application ecosystem owned by Google, also provides a long-term one-year free AI Pro plan for students in India.

Although OpenAI's latest move doesn't offer any freebies, the localized and affordable pricing level is likely to drive larger ChatGPT subscription service conversions in the Indian market.

According to information recently revealed by people familiar with the matter, OpenAI's current and former employees plan to sell shares worth about 6 billion US dollars to an investor group composed of Thrive Capital, SoftBank, and Dragoneer investment giants. The deal will bring the ChatGPT developer's valuation to 500 billion US dollars — this valuation also means the birth of the world's strongest unicorn.

It can be said that $500 billion far exceeds Elon Musk's SpaceX valuation. OpenAI management expects revenue to triple to $12.7 billion this year, compared to around $3.7 billion in 2024. This follow-up deal negotiations took place after the major launch of its highly anticipated GPT-5 AI model.

The “super bull market” belonging to the AI application sector is far from over

In the global stock market, this round of AI application super bull market driven by the big wave of AI applications is still in a hot phase. AppLovin (APP.US), an AI application leader focusing on “AI+ digital advertising,” its stock price soared by more than 11% on the trading day after announcing the results. Driven by the AI advertising engine model AXON, Applovin's net profit for the second quarter reached US$820 million, a sharp increase of 164%, and the third-quarter revenue and profit outlook easily exceeded the average expectations of Wall Street analysts.

Judging from the current technological trajectory, the development direction of AI application software is focused on “generative AI application software” (such as DeepSeek, ChatGPT, Sora, and Claude launched by Anthropic), and on the basis of generative AI, AI functions are shifting from chatbox-style question-and-answer to “AI agents that independently perform various complicated and complex tasks.” The urgent need for companies to improve efficiency and reduce operating costs can be described as vigorously promoting the two core categories of AI application software — generative AI applications and the widespread application of AI agents. Among them, AI agents are most likely a major trend in AI applications before 2030. The emergence of AI agents means that artificial intelligence is beginning to evolve from an information support tool to a highly intelligent productivity tool.

Prior to AppLovin's latest performance report, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta (META.US) had achieved strong performance growth that far exceeded expectations, driven by the new advertising engine called “AI+ Digital Advertising,” and Meta raised the lower capital expenditure limit for the full year of 2025 from US$64 billion to US$66 billion. Currently, the annual expenditure for 2025 is expected to be between US$66 billion and US$72 billion, which can be described as completely highlighting the social media giant based on the “AI+ digital advertising” model The strong growth rate of the advertising business is sufficient to support its aggressive investment in AI infrastructure.

Google's AI application business also continues to expand significantly. The Gemini generative AI application ecosystem has more than 450 million monthly active users, and the number of daily requests increased by more than 50% compared to the first quarter. Demand for inference computing power at the AI application level continues to soar, processing more than 980 trillion tokens per month, doubling from the 48 trillion in May, from the underlying AI infrastructure centered on Google's TPU and Nvidia AI GPUs to the full-stack layout of the Gemini AI application ecosystem at the top level. Differentiating advantages.