According to PYMNTS.com, mobile analytics firm Appfigures reported on Thursday, December 18, that the ChatGPT mobile app hit a staggering $2.5 billion in consumer spending in 2025 alone. This pushed its lifetime mobile revenue past the $3 billion milestone at a speed faster than major apps like TikTok and top streaming services. Back in August, Appfigures found the app had already earned $1.35 billion through July 2025, a massive jump from $174 million in the same period in 2024. In that same “AI assistant” category, the second-place app, xAI’s Grok, made just $25.6 million, highlighting ChatGPT’s dominance. OpenAI itself projects ChatGPT will grow from 35 million paid subscribers today to at least 220 million by 2030, with the conversion rate of weekly users to paid subscribers rising from 5% to 8.5%. The company also expects about 20% of future revenue to come from new shopping and advertising products.
The Reality of the AI Gold Rush
Here’s the thing: these numbers are absolutely wild, but they also paint a brutally clear picture of the market. We’re not looking at a vibrant ecosystem of competing AI assistants. We’re looking at a single, colossal winner and everyone else fighting for scraps. ChatGPT‘s mobile revenue is nearly 100 times larger than Grok’s in that head-to-head comparison. That’s not a competition; it’s a monopoly in the making. And remember, this data only includes money spent through the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. It doesn’t count web subscriptions or enterprise deals, which are likely even bigger revenue streams for OpenAI. So the real financial gap is probably even more enormous.
Where Does All That Money Come From?
Basically, it comes from us. From millions of people deciding that ChatGPT Plus or the new ChatGPT Pro is worth $20 or $30 a month. The value proposition has shifted from novelty to utility. It’s not just about asking silly questions anymore. People are using it for work, for coding, for writing, and now, as OpenAI intends, for shopping. The launch of features like the personal shopping assistant and Apps in ChatGPT is a direct path to embedding the bot into daily transactions. Think about it: if ChatGPT helps you book a trip or buy a jacket, why wouldn’t OpenAI take a cut? That’s the 20% revenue-from-shopping forecast in action.
The Platform Play Is The Real Story
But the subscription revenue, as huge as it is, might eventually be the side show. The main event is OpenAI building a new platform. The Apps SDK and the integration with partners like Canva and Coursera are a classic, powerful tech move. They’re not just making a tool; they’re making the *place* where you use all your other tools. “Start with an outline and ask Canva to transform it into a slide deck…” That’s the vision. They want ChatGPT to be the conversational layer over the entire digital world. If they succeed, the app store revenue will look like pocket change compared to the platform fees and data insights they could command.
What This Means For Everyone Else
So what’s left for the other AI companies? It’s a tough spot. Competing on pure chat capability seems almost futile now, given OpenAI’s revenue lead and its ability to reinvest that cash into even better models. The competitors will have to niche down hard or bet everything on a paradigm shift—maybe true agentic AI that *does* tasks rather than just chats about them. For consumers, this consolidation is a double-edged sword. You get a deeply integrated, powerful assistant that keeps improving. But you also get locked into a single company’s ecosystem and vision for the future of computing. The $2.5 billion year proves we’re buying in, for better or worse.
