[Legend2440]

There are 50 million consumers with paid ChatGPT subscriptions as of Feb 2026.

This is already significantly greater than the number of paid subscribers to search engines. AFAIK that's just Kagi, and they only have ~100k subscriptions.

[kibwen]

ChatGPT claims 1B MAU, so with 50M subscribers that's a 5% attach rate. And unfortunately for OpenAI there are only 8B humans on the planet, meaning an optimistic upper bound of 400M paying users if every human on the planet (this is an extremely generous upper limit, because the users currently without access to ChatGPT are statistically poorer). At $20/user/month even this absurdly optimistic projection doesn't break $100B annual revenue, which itself isn't even a quarter of Apple's annual revenue. And we all know these subscription prices are heavily subsidized and are going to increase, which, while it might improve OpenAI's financial outlook, definitely isn't going to have anything other than a negative effect on the number of subscribers, which is the point here.