How Does OpenAI's Revenue Breakdown?
OpenAI leaked that it was operating on a $2 billion Revenue run rate as of December 2023.
Of the 100 million plus ChatGPT users, how many are premium users? 1%? Maybe 2%? Let’s assume approximately 1 million users pay between $20-30 per month (pricing HERE), for some combination of OpenAI’s “Plus” (“Plus” pricing is $20 per user per month) or “Team” (“Team” has two pricing tiers - $25 and $30 per user per month), offerings. I carried the pricing mix beyond $30 per user per month in the below table as OpenAI has an “Enterprise” pricing tier for which pricing is not disclosed.
Therefore, perhaps OpenAI is generating Revenue of approximately $325 million on 1 million premium users. Perhaps $600 million or so if you assume a premium pricing uptake of 2 million users.
The remainder of the $2 billion run rate revenue would come from OpenAI’s API business. It is difficult to assume how many API calls companies may be running through OpenAI given the various API pricing and volume bundles. Nonetheless, per my rough math, OpenAI’s API business is generating $1.4-1.7 billion of revenue as of December 2023’s run rate. A big chunk of that API query business is coming from Microsoft. See OpenAI’s API pricing HERE.