OpenAI launches ChatGPT Go, a low-cost subscription tier

OpenAI took ChatGPT Go, a stripped-down subscription tier it had first tested in India in August 2025, worldwide — rolling it out to more than 170 additional countries at a US price of $8 a month, against $20 for the existing Plus tier and $200 for Pro. Go offered expanded access to a fast, everyday model (GPT-5.2 Instant) with higher message limits, more file uploads and longer memory than the free tier, but without the deeper reasoning features reserved for Plus and Pro subscribers.

OpenAI framed the launch as being about global access rather than feature depth: a price point aimed at markets, including much of the developing world, where $20 a month was too high a bar for a mainstream consumer product. The rollout came alongside a separate announcement that OpenAI would begin testing advertising on the free and Go tiers in the coming weeks, while Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise subscribers would remain ad-free — tying the low-cost tier’s economics directly to the company’s first move into advertising revenue.

Coming as OpenAI pushed to expand ChatGPT’s reach while still running at a loss on inference and compute costs, Go read as a two-sided bet: that a cheaper, ad-supported tier would grow ChatGPT’s user base in price-sensitive markets faster than Plus alone, while giving OpenAI a lower-cost segment on which to test whether advertising could offset the cost of serving free and near-free users at scale.