Listing checkedFreemiumContact salesOpenAI
The company behind ChatGPT, the Responses API and the GPT-5.6 models: consumer AI apps, developer APIs and enterprise workspaces with a permanent free tier.
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- No member reviews yet
- Price
- From $8/mo
- Last updated
Key takeaways
- OpenAI is a portfolio, not one app: ChatGPT for consumers and teams, the Responses API and SDKs for developers, Codex for coding work, image generation, and the sora-2 video models. Behind all of it sits a company whose nonprofit OpenAI Foundation governs the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC.
- What began in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab now serves everyone from free consumers to enterprise workspaces. A third-party synthesis put ChatGPT at 900 million weekly users and 50 million paying subscribers as of February 2026. Those figures are secondary, and no audit backs them.
- Pricing runs from a permanent free tier through Go at $8, Plus at $20 and Pro at $200 per month in the US as of August 2026. Business seats cost $20 to $125 per user, and the API bills per million tokens. ChatGPT subscription credits and API credits are separate pools; one never converts into the other.
- Traffic to openai.com is enormous but softening. A third-party estimate put it at about 190.4 million visits in June 2026, down from roughly 266 million in November 2025, and nobody independently confirmed the figure.
- Reception is sharply split. The US App Store showed 4.8/5 from 9.8 million ratings and G2 4.7/5, while Trustpilot sat at 1.6/5 on complaints about billing, support and wrong answers. Lawsuits filed in 2025 and 2026 allege harmful medical and safety failures; the claims are unadjudicated.
What is OpenAI?
OpenAI is the AI research and deployment company behind ChatGPT, and using it means choosing from a family of products rather than opening a single tool. ChatGPT is the general-purpose assistant for individuals, teams, educators and businesses, on the web and in official iOS and Android apps. The Responses API and client SDKs let developers embed the same models in their own software. Around those sit Codex for coding, image generation, the sora-2 and sora-2-pro video models on the API rate card, and Advanced Voice in the paid business documentation. The company's stated mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity.
The model lineup, as of August 2026, is the GPT-5.6 family: Sol for flagship reasoning and coding, Terra as the balanced option, and Luna for cost-sensitive work. All three take text and image input, produce text output, and work multilingually through the Responses API. That catalog changes fast. OpenAI's own documentation reflects frequent revisions, so every name and rate you see here carries an August 2026 date.
The corporate structure matters more here than it does for most tools. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015, adopted a capped-profit structure in 2019, and since October 2025 has been described as the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation governing OpenAI Group, a Delaware public benefit corporation. Its closest competitors are Anthropic's Claude, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI and xAI's Grok. Mistral picks up the developers who want a stronger open-weight orientation.
How it works
Pick a surface
Open chatgpt.com or the official iOS or Android app for the assistant, or create an account in the developer platform for API access. Free ChatGPT needs no paid subscription, though you'll need an account and usage limits apply.
Choose a task and a model
In ChatGPT you start a conversation and pick from the modes and tools your plan allows. On the API side, you choose a model, say GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra or Luna, and call the Responses API through an SDK.
Provide context and iterate
Type a prompt, upload an eligible file or image, speak, or pass structured text and images through the API. ChatGPT returns text, analysis, code, images or other supported results. Output can be wrong, so verify factual, medical, legal and financial claims yourself; developers wrap their own guardrails around API responses.
Export or integrate
Copy or share results from ChatGPT, or wire API output into your own application. Business workspaces layer administration, privacy and usage controls on top.
Features
ChatGPT
OpenAI's flagship conversational assistant for drafting, tutoring, planning, coding, research and analysis, across Free and paid tiers. Free covers everyday text chat plus file uploads and data analysis under separate limits; Advanced Voice shows up among the advanced features in the business credit documentation.
Responses API
How developers reach OpenAI models today, through APIs and client SDKs. Billing is usage-based per million tokens, and, per OpenAI, qualifying API customers can configure data retention, including zero data retention.
GPT-5.6 model family
Sol, Terra and Luna are the current flagship, balanced and cost-sensitive options in the developer documentation. The rate card lists Sol at $4 input and $20 output per million tokens for short context, Terra at $2 and $12, and Luna at $0.20 and $1.20, with higher long-context prices.
Codex
Coding work goes here, in both ChatGPT and API contexts. Once a plan's included limits run out, flexible ChatGPT credits can apply to Codex.
Image generation
ChatGPT plans and API model services support image-generation workflows. Plan and model limits apply.
Sora video models
The API pricing page lists sora-2 at $0.10 per second at 720p and sora-2-pro from $0.30 per second at 720p to $0.70 per second at 1080p. As for the consumer Sora app, its status is unresolved: secondary sources conflict with the current API rate card, so check before relying on it.
Business workspace controls
Business, Enterprise and Edu plans add workspace privacy, encryption, retention controls, and administrator and RBAC features. Business data stays out of training by default.
What people use it for
- Quiz yourself, learn vocabulary and practice languages.
- Plan trips, projects and daily work.
- Draft, rewrite, summarize and translate documents.
- Generate and debug code, or run coding-agent workflows.
- Analyze uploaded files and data.
- Generate images, and videos where available.
- Embed assistants, extraction, classification or generation into business software through the API.
It's not built for unsupervised high-stakes medical, legal or financial decisions. Litigation filed in 2025 and 2026 alleges harmful medical guidance, and review evidence repeatedly flags incorrect or inconsistent answers, though neither shows every output is unsafe.
Who it’s for
Pricing
Official pricingIndividual plans
Free
$0
per month
Everyday text chat with separate, changing limits for uploads, images, voice and data analysis
Go
$8
per month
US price per OpenAI's worldwide-launch announcement; localized pricing may differ
Plus
$20
per month
Monthly plan at the US price OpenAI's announcement confirms
Pro
$200
per month
For heavier research and coding access
Business plans
Business Standard
$20
per user/month, billed annually
$25 per user on monthly billing
Business Premium
$100
per user/month, billed annually
$125 monthly; 5x more usage than Standard and no five-hour limit
Enterprise
Custom
contact sales
Shared credit pools, admin and RBAC controls, business-data protections
Edu
Custom
contact sales
Education contract pricing with shared credit-pool mechanics
The free tier is permanent, not a trial, though its limits and default model change over time. Paid subscriptions auto-renew until canceled. Cancel at least 24 hours before the renewal date, and access normally runs to the end of the paid period. On refunds the documents pull in two directions: the Terms of Use say payments are non-refundable except where law requires, while OpenAI's help article says accidental purchases are generally refundable within 14 days if eligible, with Apple purchases handled through Apple. Optional ChatGPT credits cover eligible features such as Codex once included limits run out, and they aren't API credits; the business rate card prices one GPT-5.6 Sol message at 10 credits and one Sol Pro message at 50, with Instant unlimited on that card. Business seats carry per-seat limits and can draw on a workspace pool. Enterprise and Edu buy shared contract-level pools with administrator spend controls. As of August 2026 the published pages don't expose complete quotas, exact model entitlements, seat rules or credit expiry per tier, and the catalog is changing quickly, so check the live pricing pages before budgeting.
Traffic & reach
Every figure below is a third-party estimate of traffic to openai.com, a proxy for interest rather than an official number, and nobody independently confirmed the headline. The estimate puts the site at about 190.4 million visits in June 2026, drifting down from roughly 266 million in November 2025. Nearly half of visits arrive direct, AI assistants account for 22 percent and organic search for 17.6 percent, and the United States is the largest audience at 22.9 percent of visits. The same dataset counts 286.9 million brand searches a month.
Visits, June 2026
190.4M
▼ 6.3% month over month
Nov '25Jun '26
Top countries
- United States23%
- India7.1%
- Japan5.6%
- Brazil4.5%
- South Korea4.0%
Traffic sources
- Direct46%
- AI assistants22%
- Organic search18%
- Referrals9.7%
- Organic social3.0%
- Email1.3%
- Visits, last 3 months
- 589.2M
- Avg. visit
- 2m 31s
- Pages per visit
- 3.1
- Bounce rate
- 57.8%
- Brand searches / mo
- 286.9M
User reviews
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Used OpenAI on something real? Write down what you made, what it cost and what the trade-off was. The next person can decide in about a minute from that.
Be the first to reviewWhat to know before you commit
What people rate it for. Breadth, speed and ease of use come up consistently. A 2026 review synthesis reports G2 at 4.7/5 from 2,021 reviews and Capterra at 4.4/5 from 340, with writing, coding and research productivity the common positive themes. The US App Store listing showed 4.8/5 from 9.8 million ratings in August 2026, and a June 2026 specialist review called ChatGPT a versatile default for fast, flexible drafts.
The consumer complaints are a pattern. Trustpilot displayed 1.6/5 from about 2,790 reviews in 2026, with recurring complaints about glitches, slowness, incorrect or inconsistent answers, lost work, support and poor subscription value. The same synthesis describes a gap between enterprise evaluators, who tend to praise productivity, and consumers, who disproportionately report billing disputes and support failures.
The lawsuits are allegations, and worth watching. Lawsuits filed in 2025 and 2026 allege that ChatGPT produced dangerous medical guidance and failed to respond appropriately to violent and stalking warning signals. The complaints are unadjudicated, not court findings, and our sources didn't turn up OpenAI's specific responses. OpenAI's defining governance controversy remains the November 2023 board crisis and the restructuring that followed.
What happens to your data depends on your plan. OpenAI says it doesn't train by default on inputs or outputs from ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, Edu or the API, with encryption in transit and at rest and configurable retention. Individual services are different. There, OpenAI can use content to improve models, subject to the available controls and opt-outs. No confirmed data breach appeared in our sources.
The growth numbers are dated claims, not audited facts. The $122 billion round at an $852 billion post-money valuation is OpenAI's own August 2026 announcement. Figures for 900 million weekly users, 50 million subscribers, revenue and headcount are secondary or self-reported. Independent reporting in August 2026 said the company was still burning cash and not profitable, which audited statements have not confirmed either way.
The catalog moves faster than any listing. OpenAI's documentation already reflects GPT-5.6-era names, the catalog is changing rapidly, and the consumer Sora app's status is contradictory across sources. Recheck model names, plan names and prices on the live pages before committing.
Alternatives to OpenAI
DeepSeekOpen-weight AI lab whose hosted V4 models sit behind an OpenAI-compatible API, priced from $0.14 per million input tokens on a cache miss.
Z.aiZhipu AI's international chat and agent platform on its GLM models, with free web chat, credit-metered coding plans for Claude Code, Cline and OpenCode, and a per-token API.
ChatGPTOpenAI's conversational AI assistant for drafting, coding, research and data analysis, with a permanent free tier and paid plans on web, iOS and Android.
JuicyChat AIAdult character chat with community-made and custom personas, plus coin-metered images and voice on web, iOS and Android.
PixVerseAI video generator that turns prompts, photos and clips into short video, with a free daily credit allowance and a library of social effects.
GrokxAI's conversational assistant with real-time web and X search, voice mode, and Grok Imagine image and video generation on web, iOS and Android.
Frequently asked questions
Company & links
- Company
- OpenAI
- Founded
- 2015
- Founders
- Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba
- Leadership
- Sam Altman is CEO. He was part of the founding group in 2015 alongside Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman and Wojciech Zaremba. Our sources don't document a complete current executive roster.
- Funding
- Two large rounds are on record: a $40 billion commitment in March 2025 at a reported $300 billion post-money valuation led by SoftBank, per a secondary source, and $122 billion committed in August 2026 at an $852 billion post-money valuation, which OpenAI says was anchored by Amazon, NVIDIA and SoftBank with Microsoft continuing. The lifetime total is unreconciled: a third-party record puts it at $196 billion, which the official announcements don't confirm.
- Scale
- Headcount is best stated as roughly 6,700 to 7,900: a third-party record reports 6,755 workers without a clear date, and a workforce article reports about 7,850 at the end of 2025. A third-party record also reports $1.3 billion in annual revenue, but its date and methodology are unclear, so treat it as unverified rather than company-confirmed.
Try OpenAI on work you already know
A task you’ve done before is the fastest way to judge whether OpenAI fits your workflow and budget. Check the current plan terms on the official site before you subscribe.