OpenAI has announced the significant expansion of its ChatGPT Go plan—an affordable subscription that costs less than five dollars per month—introducing the service to sixteen additional nations located across Asia. This strategic rollout underscores the company’s goal of democratizing access to cutting-edge artificial intelligence tools. The newly included countries encompass Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, the Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, East Timor, and Vietnam. By adding these regions, OpenAI is effectively broadening its footprint in one of the most rapidly developing digital markets in the world, making AI-powered productivity and creativity tools accessible to a far wider audience.
In certain markets—specifically Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Pakistan—the company has begun supporting payments in local currencies, allowing subscribers to avoid the complications of foreign exchange rates and international payment fees. This localization effort reflects OpenAI’s awareness of regional economic conditions and its attempt to provide users with a seamless subscription experience. However, in the remaining Asian territories where local payment integration is not yet available, subscribers are required to pay in U.S. dollars, at a rate hovering around five dollars per month. The exact price that each customer pays may still fluctuate slightly due to differing local tax regulations and currency conversions.
The ChatGPT Go tier is designed to deliver a noticeable enhancement in user experience when compared to the free plan. Subscribers benefit from higher daily limits on message counts, image generation capacity, as well as file and image uploads. Perhaps even more importantly, the plan offers twice the memory of the free version, enabling the system to produce more nuanced, context-aware, and personalized responses. This increased memory allows ChatGPT to remember details across longer conversations, contributing to more coherent exchanges and continuity over time.
OpenAI attributes this expansion to a remarkable surge in user engagement throughout the Southeast Asian region. The company reports that its weekly active user base there has grown up to fourfold in recent months—a testament to the rising interest in AI-assisted tools for education, business productivity, and creative expression. The ChatGPT Go plan first debuted in India in August, followed by an official launch in Indonesia in September, both of which have produced substantial growth. According to OpenAI, the number of paying subscribers in India alone has doubled since the plan’s introduction, highlighting the robust demand for affordable, high-quality AI access in emerging technological economies.
The company’s push into new territories is also part of a broader competitive landscape. OpenAI finds itself in direct rivalry with Google, which is similarly working to expand the reach of its artificial intelligence offerings at accessible price points. Google introduced its Google AI Plus plan in Indonesia in September, thereafter extending availability to over forty additional countries. Priced comparably to OpenAI’s plan, the Plus tier offers access to Gemini 2.5 Pro—Google’s most advanced AI model to date—along with a suite of creative tools supporting visual and multimedia projects. These include Flow for design tasks, Whisk for image remixing, and Veo 3 Fast for high-speed video generation, complemented by 200 gigabytes of cloud storage to accommodate user-created content.
OpenAI’s recent expansion initiative coincides with a pivotal milestone in its corporate trajectory. During its DevDay 2025 conference in San Francisco, CEO Sam Altman revealed that ChatGPT had surpassed 800 million weekly active users worldwide, marking a significant rise from 700 million reported just a few months earlier in August. In the same announcement, OpenAI introduced a sweeping platform transformation: ChatGPT will now host integrated applications functioning within the interface itself. This move effectively turns the chatbot into an AI-driven ecosystem similar to an app marketplace, with launch partners including Spotify, DoorDash, and Uber already building experiences that operate inside ChatGPT.
Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT, elaborated on this vision in an interview with TechCrunch during the event’s sidelines, describing the forthcoming evolution as a shift toward an operating-system-like environment. In this model, users could seamlessly access specialized applications depending on their needs—whether writing, coding, or interacting with goods and services. Each distinct function would exist as a standalone app within ChatGPT’s broader framework, illustrating OpenAI’s ambition to create a unified platform central to digital productivity and interaction.
Despite the enthusiasm surrounding growth and innovation, OpenAI’s operational challenges remain substantial. Even with its soaring valuation, which has recently reached approximately five hundred billion dollars, the company reported a 7.8 billion dollar operating loss in the first half of 2025. This shortfall stems largely from its tremendous investment in AI infrastructure and computing resources necessary to sustain global demand. Within this context, affordable plans such as ChatGPT Go are strategically positioned as key components of the company’s path toward long-term financial sustainability. By appealing to price-sensitive yet fast-expanding markets in Asia—where both OpenAI and Google are vying for dominance—the company aims to expand its subscription base while edging closer to profitability. In essence, this expansion signals both an impressive feat of technological outreach and a calculated effort to balance accessibility, growth, and fiscal responsibility in the evolving realm of artificial intelligence.
Sourse: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/09/openais-affordable-chatgpt-go-plan-expands-to-16-new-countries-in-asia/
