ChatGPT ads in India: advertisers can start from 725 rupees a day

What OpenAI launched in India

As BornCity reported, OpenAI has started selling advertising in India. At the end of August 2026 it first allowed ads to appear beneath ChatGPT's answers. They are shown to adult users on the Free plan and on the Go plan, a lower-priced tier.

The entry price is a minimum budget of 725 rupees per day. The source converts that to roughly 8 US dollars. Exchange rates move, so treat the dollar figure as an approximation.

The named advertisers are a mix of jewelry, fashion, hair care, shopping, matchmaking, insurance and education brands: Tanishq, Palmonas, Fastrack, Traya, Tata Neu, Shaadi.com, Axis Max Life and NMIMS.

The plumbing behind the ads

On 5 October 2026, OpenAI announced a partnership with Razorpay, an Indian payments company. Razorpay's job is to handle the ads and to measure how well they perform in the country.

Measurement matters because advertisers want to know what a rupee spent actually brought back. Local payment handling also lowers the effort for Indian businesses that want to buy ads without dealing with foreign billing.

The source does not describe how the ads look, how they are labeled, or how they are chosen to match a conversation. Those details are still unknown from this report.

Why India, and why now

India has become ChatGPT's largest market by weekly active users, according to OpenAI chief Sam Altman, who said it has passed the United States. He did not give total figures. He added that the US is unusually negative about AI, while fast-growing economies with a lot of unmet demand tend to adopt new technology more readily.

OpenAI's India head, Prabhjeet Singh, said on 3 November 2026 that ChatGPT's Indian user base has doubled since January 2026. He described the focus as moving from trying out AI to using it widely in companies. The topics he listed were better support for Indian languages, payment tools, data infrastructure, local competition and trust in AI.

Growth like that is impressive, but it does not automatically produce revenue. Ads are one way to earn money from people who will never pay a subscription.

The money problem behind the move

The source says earning money in India remains hard. So far only a small share of users pay for ChatGPT, and those who do may face rising prices.

The costs are real. Heavier use of AI models does not always save time or money. The source notes that running AI for programming has at times cost more than paying human programmers. It also says growing energy and computing costs will increasingly have to be carried by users.

Put together, this explains the interest in advertising. If most users pay nothing and the service is expensive to run, someone else has to cover the bill, and advertisers are the obvious candidates.

A snapshot from South Korea

The same report shows how strong ChatGPT's position is elsewhere in Asia. Data from Mobile Index and IGAWorks put ChatGPT at 18.76 million monthly mobile users in South Korea in October 2026. That was up 43.8 percent from 13.05 million a year earlier, and it gave the app 91 percent of the AI app users tracked there.

Monthly time spent in the app rose to 50.98 million hours, up 113.9 percent from 23.83 million. Average time per person was 163 minutes, compared with 110 a year before.

New downloads fell 16.2 percent to about 790,000. Anthropic's Claude came second with 2.1 million users, roughly 15 times its figure from a year earlier of 139,131. Perplexity fell 30.9 percent to 570,000 users, and the local app A-dot fell 42.5 percent to 1.07 million.