The market for custom GPTs just grew to 100M+ users — or has it?

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This article was first posted on LinkedIn on 31 May 2024.

Yesterday, OpenAI announced that custom GPTs are now available to all ChatGPT users — including on the free tier. Previously, you had to have a ChatGPT Plus subscription to access custom GPTs. It would appear that the available market for custom GPTs jumped to 100M+ users overnight — but has it really?

Firstly, there are pretty limited usage limits so quite quickly the user sees a message prompting them to sign up for ChatGPT Plus.

Secondly, some features such as DALLE-3 image generation are not available to ChatGPT free tiers at all. Other advanced functionalities like web browsing and document upload are allowed on the free tier, but stricter rate limits apply.

So it’s more accurate to say that ChatGPT users on the free tier have limited access to custom GPTs. Effectively, it allows more users to try before they buy to help Open AI convert free users to sign up for a ChatGPT Plus subscription.

This move is hardly nefarious by Open AI. Limitations of access notwithstanding, Thursday’s rollout by Open AI is directionally correct and we warmly welcome the move. It’s a win-win for themselves, developers and end users.

A robust ecosystem of apps built by third party developers are a tried in true playbook to drive demand for the underlying technology (in this case, Open AI’s generative AI models).

The bet here is that while users might be lukewarm about paying for a general tool like ChatGPT, they made be prompted to pay if ChatGPT apps (i.e. custom GPTs) make it easy for the end user to gain lots of value or perform a specific useful task without having to become experts in writing code or prompt engineering.

Exciting times ahead!