The Business of ChatGPT
Since launching in May 2023, ChatGPT’s app for iOS and Android devices has reached $2 billion in global consumer spending, according to a new analysis by app intelligence provider Appfigures. That figure is approximately 30x the combined lifetime spending of ChatGPT’s rivals on mobile, including Claude, Copilot, and Grok, the analysis indicates.
So far this year, ChatGPT’s mobile app has made $1.35 billion, up 673% year-over-year from the $174 million it made during the same period (January-July) in 2024, per the data. On average, the app is generating close to $193 million per month, up from $25 million last year.
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In the U.S., ChatGPT’s spending per download to date is even higher, at $10, leading the market to account for 38% of the app’s revenue to date. Germany is the second-largest market, accounting for 5.3% of ChatGPT’s lifetime total spending.
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In 2025 so far, ChatGPT’s app has been downloaded 318 million times, or 2.8x more than the 113 million it saw during the same period last year. By the number of installs, however, India is the top market, accounting for 13.7% of lifetime downloads, compared with second place, the U.S., which accounted for 10.3% of all downloads.
OpenAI researcher Yann Dubois asked the model to create an app to help his partner learn French. And in a few minutes GPT-5 churned out several iterations, with flashcards, a progress tracker, and even a simple snake-style game with a French twist, a mouse and cheese variation to learn new vocab.
The GPT-5 debut instantly wiped out a big chunk of Duolingo’s progress, cutting the 30% gains in half. And the downward momentum continued Friday, with the stock sinking 5% to end the week.
People have argued that AI is in a bubble because it costs too much to provide AI services. However the current cost of training or inference is not a law of physics. GPT-5 prices are significantly cheaper than GPT-4 and this is just one release worth of optimizations. They definitely are opportunities to bring costs down further. The current prices won’t last forever.
Nick Turley (via John Gruber):
This week, ChatGPT is on track to reach 700M weekly active users — up from 500M at the end of March and 4× since last year.
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There is definitely someone at Apple who was just grinding their teeth in anger reading this thinking about the injustice of not getting 30% off the top of all those subscriptions. Or do they offer in-app purchase? I of course never bothered to find out because websites don't need intermediaries leeching insane margins to use them.
Duolingo themselves apparently announced that they made a ton of lessons using AI. I really don't know what else they expected to happen besides going out of business.
Dare is right, it's the same principle with electronics. We aren't using enormous insanely expensive computrons anymore. The costs only go down once it becomes established.
And yeah, even the people I know who have nothing to do with computers know about ChatGPT and use it. It's completely mainstream now. It's going to be real interesting to see where this goes considering the somewhat drastic changes they already made to GPT-5.
