OpenAI offers free ChatGPT Go in India: Marketing strategy analysis

OpenAI just made its biggest bet on India yet. Starting November 4, the company will hand out free year-long access to ChatGPT Go — a move that puts every marketing executive on notice about how aggressively AI companies are fighting for the world’s fastest-growing digital market.

OpenAI will offer its ChatGPT Go plan to users in India who sign up during a limited promotional period starting November 4. For those tracking ad spend, customer acquisition costs, and market share battles, this isn’t charity — it’s calculated warfare in a market where the prize is 1.4 billion potential users.

The timing reveals a sophisticated strategy. The announcement coincides with OpenAI’s DevDay Exchange developer conference in Bengaluru on November 4, where the company is expected to make India-specific announcements aimed at local developers and enterprises. Launching a product alongside an ecosystem play simultaneously? That’s textbook platform marketing.

The US$17 billion prize

India’s AI market is expected to triple in value to US$17 billion by 2027, according to a Boston Consulting Group white paper.The country is OpenAI’s second-largest market and one of its fastest-growing, prompting the company to establish a New Delhi office in August and build a local team.

The competitive context makes this offer significant. The move follows similar strategies by Perplexity and Google, which both provided free access to premium AI features in India recently to attract users.

Perplexity partnered with Airtel to offer free Perplexity Pro subscriptions to the telecom operator’s 360 million subscribers, while Google introduced a free one-year AI Pro plan for students.

Battle lines drawn

The numbers tell the story. In the second quarter of 2025, Perplexity’s downloads in India surged 600% year-on-year to 2.8 million, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT saw a 587% increase, reaching 46.7 million downloads.

However, ChatGPT maintains a significant lead in absolute numbers, with 19.8 million monthly active users, versus 3.7 million for Perplexity. The ChatGPT Go programme answers an insight from the market. Launched in India in August, the tier was developed following user feedback calling for more affordable access to ChatGPT’s advanced features.

In its first month, the number of paid ChatGPT subscribers in India more than doubled, demonstrating strong product-market fit. Following the response, OpenAI expanded ChatGPT Go to nearly 90 countries worldwide.

What marketers should know

ChatGPT Go delivers substantial value. The plan provides higher message limits, more image generation, longer memory, and the ability to upload more files and images. At the standard pricing of less than US$5 per month, the 12-month giveaway represents a serious customer acquisition investment.

Nick Turley, Vice President and Head of ChatGPT, stated: “Since initially launching ChatGPT Go in India a few months ago, the adoption and creativity we’ve seen from our users has been inspiring. Ahead of our first DevDay Exchange event in India, we’re making ChatGPT Go freely available for a year to help more people across India easily access and benefit from advanced AI”.

The retention play is equally smart. Existing ChatGPT Go subscribers in India will also be eligible for the free 12-month promotion, preventing churn while rewarding early adopters – a lesson in lifetime value economics.

The distribution playbook

India has over 700 million smartphone users and more than a billion internet subscribers, creating unprecedented scale for digital products. Unlike competitors relying on telecom partnerships, OpenAI’s direct-to-consumer approach builds first-party relationships with users – a valuable asset for long-term monetisation.

Professor Payal Arora of Utrecht University said that India serves as a “high-pressure testing ground,” and a source of training data sets. Training AI on vast Indian data sets pushes models to handle linguistic diversity, low-resource contexts, and noisy real-world data, something that makes them more robust, globally.

Three marketing lessons

The initiative offers clear takeaways for marketing professionals. First, OpenAI is sacrificing short-term revenue for market position – a classic land-grab in winner-take-most digital markets.

Secondly, synchronising the offer with DevDay Exchange creates compound marketing value through ecosystem momentum. Thirdly, extending benefits to existing subscribers demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of customer lifetime value.

OpenAI positioned the promotion as “a continuation of OpenAI’s ‘Indiafirst’ commitment and supports the IndiaAI Mission, reinforcing the growing momentum around AI in India as the country prepares to host the AI Impact Summit next year” – a strategic alignment with national priorities that strengthens the company’s geopolitical positioning.

The monetisation challenge

Monetising India’s large user base remains challenging, with consumers notoriously price-sensitive. Yet the scale opportunity is enormous. Converting even a small fraction of free users to paid subscribers after the promotional period could justify the acquisition cost through lifetime value, particularly as AI embeds itself deeper into professional workflows.

What this means

OpenAI’s announcement signals that AI platform wars have entered a decisive phase where user acquisition at scale trumps immediate monetisation. For marketing professionals, the lesson is clear: in transformative technology markets, aggressive distribution and ecosystem building matter more than traditional margin optimisation.

As AI capabilities commoditise, winners will be determined by who captures user habits and builds the strongest network effects first. 

See also: OpenAI argues against ChatGPT data deletion in Indian court

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