OpenAI just made ChatGPT Go available free for a year to new users, free users, and existing Go subscribers in India starting November 4, 2025, a radical move that flips the traditional AI business model on its head. While most tech companies carefully meter access to their premium products, OpenAI is handing its paid tier to potentially 700 million smartphone users without asking for a single rupee. This isn’t charity. It’s a calculated bet on the future of AI economics.
Why India, Why Now?
The timing matters. India became OpenAI’s second-largest user base after the US, but getting people to pay has been another story entirely. ChatGPT Go launched in India in August at Rs 399 per month (under $5), already cheaper than the global Plus plan. Within weeks, the company opened its first office in Delhi and started hiring local teams for education and operations. They put up billboards in major metros. Then came this offer.
What makes ChatGPT Go worth giving away? The plan includes much higher usage limits than the free version, image generation, file uploads, and GPT-5 access with extended memory for personalized responses. For students coding late into the night, freelancers juggling multiple clients, or small business owners trying to compete without big budgets, these aren’t nice extras. They’re the difference between dabbling in AI and actually building something with it. 
The Real Game: Scale, Habit, and Data
In the first month after launch, paid ChatGPT subscribers in India more than doubled. OpenAI clearly saw something working. But instead of slowly growing a subscriber base, they chose to flood the market. Why?
The answer sits at the intersection of scale, habit, and data. Getting millions of users comfortable with premium AI features could create behavioral lock-in. After a year of higher message limits and better responses, going back to the basic free tier will feel like downgrading from a smartphone to a flip phone. Whether users actually convert to paying customers remains to be seen, especially since they’ll need to actively cancel to avoid being billed at the regular Go rate after the free period ends. But the real value might not be subscription revenue at all.
Every conversation, every prompt, every way Indians use GPT-5 potentially feeds insights into how AI works in diverse, multilingual, mobile-first environments. India has over 700 million smartphone users. Most access the internet primarily through phones, not laptops. They switch between languages mid-sentence. They have different reference points, different problems to solve, different ways of thinking about technology. This kind of usage data, at this scale, is extraordinarily valuable for training future models.
The Competition is Already Here
OpenAI isn’t alone in recognizing India’s strategic importance. Google offered eligible college students a free year of Gemini Pro, which includes 2TB of storage and integration across Workspace apps. Perplexity partnered with Airtel to give its 360 million subscribers access to Pro features. The pattern is clear: AI companies see India not as a market to monetize today but as a training ground for tomorrow.
What Happens After Year One?
What happens after the free year ends matters more than the promotion itself. If OpenAI has built genuine utility into people’s daily workflows, the conversion rates could justify the upfront investment. If they haven’t, they’ll have spent a year subsidizing a product people abandon the moment it costs money. The playbook only works if the product becomes essential.
There’s also a competitive angle. By making GPT-5 the default AI for millions of Indians, OpenAI gets ahead of rivals trying to do the same thing. Being first may matter more than having the best model. It might be about becoming the AI that people instinctively turn to, the one they already know how to use, the one their work is already built around.
This experiment could reshape how AI companies think about global expansion. Instead of slowly rolling out paid tiers and hoping for organic growth, what if the playbook becomes simpler? Identify massive markets with high digital adoption but low purchasing power. Give away premium access to build scale and habit. Then monetize through enterprise deals, API access, and the small percentage who convert to paid plans after the free period.
If it works in India, expect similar offers in Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, and other high-population markets where traditional subscription models struggle. If it doesn’t, we’ll see AI companies retreat to focusing on wealthier markets where people already pay for software.
Either way, OpenAI’s India bet is forcing the entire industry to reconsider what an AI business model actually looks like at billion-user scale. The answer might not be selling subscriptions at all.
