Seven questions a day is the unit of OpenAI's advertising business

OpenAI's chief financial officer put numbers on ChatGPT usage in an interview released on September 9. Free users run about seven turns a day. The first paid tier does roughly fifteen. Plus, at $20 a month, does about three times a free user, and Pro about eleven times.

Rohan Paul@rohanpaul_ai

OpenAI's usage pattern from CFO Sarah Friar's new interview.

"Our free users do about seven turns, or seven questions, a day. Our first paid tier does double that, about 15. Our real paid tier, Plus, which is $20, is about 3x, and Pro is about 11x over a free user."

Our mission at OpenAI is AGI for the benefit of humanity, not for the benefit of humanity who can pay, or for the benefit of humanity who live in an enterprise"

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From @theallinpod YouTube channel, (link in comment)

Those are subscription numbers on their face. Read them again as inventory.

Seven turns a day, thirty days, is 210 questions a month from a user paying nothing. A Plus subscriber at three times that rate produces about 630 questions for $20, which is 3.2 cents a question. That is the price OpenAI has established for one interaction with a paying customer, and it is the only per-unit figure in this story that anyone has verified.

Now the free side. SemiAnalysis was writing a year ago about a free base above 700 million and growing quickly, and argued then that GPT-5 was built for those users rather than for power users, with indirect monetisation as the prize. Take that number, stale and conservative as it now is, and multiply by seven. Roughly five billion free interactions a day (and the real figure is higher, because that user count is from last August).

Tibor Blaho's weekly recap on September 6, citing OpenAI, put ChatGPT Ads at a one billion dollar annualised run rate in under two hundred days. Divide a billion a year across five billion daily turns and you get about 0.06 cents per free interaction. (Our arithmetic, three sources deep, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a figure.)

So a Plus turn is worth roughly fifty-seven times an advertised one, today.

That ratio is the whole business question, and it can be read two ways. Pessimistically, ads on assistant traffic monetise terribly and always will, because a person asking how to reformat a spreadsheet has no commercial intent worth bidding on. Optimistically, a business that reached a billion dollars in under two hundred days while capturing a fifty-seventh of the obvious value has an enormous amount of room, and the room is the point.

We lean optimistic, with a caveat that matters. The free user count is a year old and is certainly higher now, which pushes the per-turn ad figure down rather than up. What would move us is disclosure of turns with an ad shown, which no lab publishes and all of them measure.

Friar paired the numbers with a line about why the free tier exists at all. "Our mission at OpenAI is AGI for the benefit of humanity, not for the benefit of humanity who can pay, or for the benefit of humanity who live in an enterprise."

Read literally, that is a mission statement. Read as a CFO speaking to investors, it is the case for advertising, phrased as a case against paywalls — and the two readings are not in conflict, which is what makes it a good line. You keep the free tier open because it is right, and the free tier turns out to be the asset.

Which brings the obvious question. If a free user is worth 0.06 cents a turn and a Plus user 3.2 cents, why would OpenAI ever push a free user to subscribe rather than to ask more questions?

It would not, past a point, and that is the shift to watch. Our expectation is that the next usage metric an OpenAI executive volunteers in public will be turns per day rather than subscriber counts, because turns per day is the number that gets better when the free tier grows.