Comment by trilogic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trilogic | Hacker News Reader

What blow my mind is the fact that 20/30 dollar subscription is not enough to sustain the business? Pushing for 200 dollars subscription to keep afloat with it. If like claimed there are 1 billion users and 10% do the 30usd/month means 1 dollar/day x 100 million. How is that not enough to maintain this prices? Then you have all the inside business happening (users data, targeted ads, worldwide insights and intelligence, even monopoly of narrative) which would be your real passive income profit.

Users dont use all the time the service so they compensate each-other with power users. So for now getting from users at least 36B/year making an estimate evaluation of 360B (other incomes included, evaluation goes up to near a trillion). Be happy team you are the only one that you made it, but is enough one mistake in this house of cards. Again struggling to understand this logic even though you have access to the best intelligence in the world...

Because it's not 10%, it's ~25mn (tibo kept putting out resets at major milestones). It was like 4mn a few months ago.

The api margins are like 70%-90% (depending on who you ask, and not taking into account r&d), even lower with luna and their recent cuts. The subscription is even worse because they often use it as a loss leader for building hype at releases.

>It was like 4mn a few months ago Do you have any source for it? If what you say is true it mean OpenAI is in big trouble (with revenue just a couple of hundreds of millions, far, very far from 1 billion monthly). You got my attention, but very hard to believe that.

What I wanted to say yesterday is that we hit 25M active users (Aug 30) - tibo

https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2094252447271366730

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"Happy Tuesday. Codex has hit 4M active users, adding over 1M users in less than two weeks. To celebrate we will reset the rate limits again in a few hours. Enjoy!" 10:52 AM · Apr 21, 2026

https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2046602907077038501

That's just not enough dollar volume to pay for all the inference, data center buildout, training, salary costs to compete with Meta etc etc. They also need to pay for the inference of the 98% of users who don't pay anything but use the models, that's essentially a marketing cost.

But Meta until very recently offered its services mostly for free, on a gigantic scale, paid for by ads. Now OpenAI has subscription revenue, API revenue, and ads revenue too. The fact that OpenAI isn’t financially sustainable makes me think it hasn’t really mastered its business yet.

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