There’s probably no better way to attract a new audience than with discounts. The company first dropped the price of two GPT-5.6 models, and a day later reported crossing the 1 billion active user mark. But that doesn’t mean the company has become profitable.
There’s probably no better way to attract a new audience than with discounts. The company first dropped the price of two GPT-5.6 models, and a day later reported crossing the 1 billion active user mark. But that doesn’t mean the company has become profitable.
Recall that on July 30, OpenAI reduced the price of GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% and GPT-5.6 Terra by 20% . The price of Sol, OpenAI's flagship and most productive model, remained unchanged.
The next day, Fryer announced that OpenAI’s models now reach over one billion active users and more than two million businesses. The company didn’t specify whether the latter figure refers to weekly or monthly audiences, but given its previous announcement of over 900 million weekly users on ChatGPT, it’s likely the former, TechSpot reports .
OpenAI also notes that user engagement only increases over time. Six months after signing up, people are sending about 50% more messages per day and using ChatGPT for twice as many different tasks.
But all that huge audience has yet to translate into profitability. In 2025, OpenAI’s revenue was $13.07 billion, but losses reached $21 billion. At the same time, only about 50 million of the 900 million weekly users at the time paid for a subscription. It has also been reported that fixed-price subscriptions can become unprofitable if the service is used intensively.
Lower prices could encourage even wider adoption of the technology, but analysts warn that this could put additional pressure on margins as the company continues to spend huge amounts on computing infrastructure.
