OpenAI has expanded its low-cost subscription service, ChatGPT Go, costing less than $5 per month, to 16 Asian countries. This expansion brings the service to Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam.
ChatGPT Go offers twice the memory of free users, improving the quality of personalized responses and easing limits on message transmission, image generation, and image uploads. OpenAI reported that weekly active users in Southeast Asia have increased by up to four times, following its initial launch in India in August and its subsequent expansion to Indonesia in September. Paid subscribers in India have more than doubled.
This move comes amid global competition from Google, which introduced a similarly priced "Google AI Plus" plan in Indonesia in September and has since expanded to over 40 countries. This service offers creative tools such as the generative AI "Gemini 2.5 Pro," the design tool Flow, the image remix tool Whisk, and the video creator Veo 3 Fast, as well as 200GB of cloud storage.
This expansion comes shortly after OpenAI surpassed 800 million weekly active users worldwide. At DevDay 2025 in San Francisco, CEO Sam Altman announced that ChatGPT will evolve beyond a simple chatbot into an "app store-like ecosystem." Users will be able to access partner apps like Spotify, Zillow, and Coursera directly within ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, OpenAI, despite recording an operating loss of $7.8 billion in the first half of 2025, is valued at $500 billion. Despite expanding infrastructure investments, the company's core strategy is to expand its user base and secure profitability through low-cost subscription models like ChatGPT Go.
