OpenAI is bringing its most affordable ChatGPT Go plan to millions more people, rolling it out across 16 additional countries in Asia for under $5. The new markets include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, East Timor, and Vietnam.
To make sign-ups easier, OpenAI is supporting local currency payments in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Pakistan. In other countries, the price is roughly $5 in USD, with final costs varying based on local taxes.
ChatGPT Go is designed for everyday use, offering higher daily limits for messages, image generation, and file or image uploads. It also doubles the memory compared to the free plan, allowing more personalized and consistent responses over time.
The expansion follows strong regional momentum. OpenAI says its weekly active users in Southeast Asia have grown by up to four times. After launching ChatGPT Go in India in August and Indonesia in September, paid subscriptions in India have doubled.
This push comes amid intensifying competition to make AI more accessible worldwide. Google recently introduced its similarly priced Google AI Plus plan, first in Indonesia and then to more than 40 countries. That tier provides access to the Gemini 2.5 Pro model, creative tools for image and video production such as Flow, Whisk, and Veo 3 Fast, and 200GB of cloud storage.
OpenAI’s move also arrives at a pivotal moment for the company. At its DevDay 2025 event in San Francisco, CEO Sam Altman announced ChatGPT has reached 800 million weekly active users globally, up from 700 million in August. The company also unveiled a major platform shift: apps that run directly inside ChatGPT, turning the chatbot into a full ecosystem with partners such as Spotify, Zillow, and Coursera. Executives described a vision of ChatGPT evolving into an operating-system-like hub, where users can launch specialized tools for writing, coding, and interacting with goods and services.
Behind the scenes, OpenAI is balancing rapid growth with heavy investment. Despite a recent valuation of around $500 billion, the company reported a $7.8 billion operating loss in the first half of 2025 as it pours resources into AI infrastructure. Lower-cost tiers like ChatGPT Go are a key part of the strategy to widen adoption and move toward profitability, especially in high-growth Asian markets where OpenAI and Google are competing aggressively for market share.
For users across the newly added countries, ChatGPT Go provides a budget-friendly way to tap into powerful AI features, with convenient local payment options in select markets and a steady stream of product upgrades designed to make the service more useful every day.
