OpenAI has just made its biggest bet ever on India. The company will be handing out free annual access to ChatGPT Go starting November 4th. It’s a move that lets all marketing executives know how aggressively AI companies are fighting for the world’s fastest-growing digital market.
OpenAI is offering ChatGPT Go plans to users in India who sign up during a limited promotional period starting November 4th. For those who track ad spend, customer acquisition costs, and market share battles, this is no charity. It’s a calculated war in a market where the prize is 1.4 billion potential users.
Timing reveals a sophisticated strategy. The announcement coincides with OpenAI’s DevDay Exchange developer conference in Bengaluru on November 4, where the company plans to make India-specific announcements aimed at local developers and enterprises. Do you simultaneously launch your product alongside your ecosystem? That’s textbook platform marketing.
$17 billion in prize money
India’s AI market is expected to triple to US$17 billion by 2027, according to a Boston Consulting Group white paper, and the country is OpenAI’s second-largest market and one of the fastest growing, prompting the company to open an office in New Delhi and build a local team in August.
Given the competitive landscape, this proposal becomes important. The move follows a similar strategy by Perplexity and Google, which recently offered free access to premium AI features in India to attract users.
Perplexity partnered with Airtel to offer a free Perplexity Pro subscription to the telco’s 360 million subscribers, while Google introduced a free one-year AI Pro plan for students.
drawn battle lines
The numbers speak for themselves. In the second quarter of 2025, Perplexity downloads in India grew 600% year over year to 2.8 million, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT grew 587% to 46.7 million.
However, ChatGPT maintains a significant lead in absolute numbers, with 19.8 million monthly active users compared to Perplexity’s 3.7 million. The ChatGPT Go program answers market insights. Launched in India in August, this tier was developed following feedback from users who wanted access to ChatGPT’s advanced features at a more affordable price.
In the first month, the number of ChatGPT paid subscribers in India more than doubled, demonstrating a strong product-market fit. In response, OpenAI expanded ChatGPT Go to nearly 90 countries around the world.
What marketers need to know
ChatGPT Go offers great value. This plan offers higher message limits, more image generation, more memory, and more file and image upload capabilities. At a standard price of less than $5 per month, 12 months of benefits is a serious investment in customer acquisition.
Nick Turley, Vice President and Head of ChatGPT, said, “Since we first launched ChatGPT Go in India a few months ago, we have been inspired by user adoption and creativity. Ahead of our first DevDay Exchange event in India, we are making ChatGPT Go available for free for a year to help more people across India easily access and benefit from advanced AI.”
Retention play is equally smart. Existing ChatGPT Go subscribers in India will also be eligible for a free 12-month promotion, rewarding early adopters while preventing churn and providing a lesson in the economics of lifetime value.
distribution playbook
India has over 700 million smartphone users and over 1 billion internet subscribers, creating unprecedented scale for digital products. Unlike competitors that rely on communications partnerships, OpenAI’s direct-to-consumer approach builds first-party relationships with users, making it a valuable asset for long-term monetization.
Payal Arora, a professor at Utrecht University, said India serves as a “high-pressure testing ground” and a source of training datasets. Training AI on India’s vast dataset allows the model to handle linguistic diversity, low-resource contexts, and noisy real-world data, making it more globally robust.
3 marketing lessons
This effort offers clear lessons for marketing professionals. First, OpenAI sacrifices short-term revenue to gain market position. This is a classic land grab in a digital market where the winner takes most of the time.
Then, sync your offers with DevDay Exchange to create compound marketing value through ecosystem momentum. Third, extending benefits to existing subscribers shows a sophisticated understanding of customer lifetime value.
OpenAI describes the promotion as “a continuation of OpenAI’s ‘India First’ commitment, supporting IndiaAI’s mission and reinforcing the growing momentum around AI in the country as the country prepares to host the AI Impact Summit next year,” calling it a strategic alignment with national priorities that strengthens the company’s geopolitical positioning.
Monetization challenges
Monetizing India’s large user base remains difficult, and consumers are notoriously price-sensitive. Still, the opportunities to scale are enormous. Particularly when AI is deeply integrated into a professional’s workflow, converting even a small portion of free users into paid subscribers after a promotional period can help justify acquisition costs through lifetime value.
what this means
OpenAI’s announcement suggests that the AI platform wars have entered a phase where large-scale user acquisition is more important than immediate monetization. For marketing professionals, the lesson is clear. In the transformative technology market, active distribution and ecosystem building are more important than traditional profit margin optimization.
As AI capabilities become commoditized, the winner will be determined by who understands user habits and builds the most powerful network effects first.
See also: OpenAI opposes ChatGPT data deletion in Indian court
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