OpenAI opens the GPT Store to everyone for free

Until now, if you wanted to have ChatGPT summarize a PDF, search the web, or run a specialized bot made by someone else, you had to pony up $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus.

During its Spring update livestream on May 13, OpenAI blew those gates wide open. CTO Mira Murati announced that the company is opening up some of its most powerful previously paywalled features to all free users.

Millions of custom bots, now open to all

Chief among the updates is the GPT Store, which first launched for paid subscribers back on January 10.

Up until now, the audience for custom bots like scientific research assistant Consensus, logo makers, and image generators was trapped behind the Plus paywall. That made it tough for builders, even as OpenAI began testing an engagement-based revenue-sharing program in March.

Now, anyone using ChatGPT can browse and use custom bots for free.

There is a catch, though: free users can only use custom GPTs. If you want to build and share your own, you still need to pay for a subscription.

Alongside the store access, OpenAI is also giving free users the ability to upload files and photos for summaries and analysis, browse the web, and use GPT-4 with chat memory.

Murati also rolled out the new multimodal GPT-4o model, showed off a new Mac desktop app with Windows coming later this year, and revamped the web interface so users can focus on collaboration rather than UI.

Why it matters

This is a massive power move to solidify ChatGPT as the default operating system for consumer AI.

For everyday users, the value is immediate. If you only occasionally need to analyze a spreadsheet, summarize a paper, or tap into specialized research bots, there is almost no reason to pay $20 a month anymore. The free tier suddenly feels like a complete product rather than a stripped-down demo.

For builders, it solves the platform's biggest bottleneck: distribution. Opening the floodgates to free users turns the GPT Store from a paid club into a genuine app ecosystem, giving that March revenue-sharing experiment a realistic shot at succeeding.

It also spells trouble for the countless wrapper startups charging monthly fees just for PDF chat or web-connected search. OpenAI just commoditized their entire business models for free.

The real test now will be capacity. It remains to be seen how aggressive the rate limits will be on the free tier, but OpenAI seems more than willing to eat the computing cost if it means choking out the competition and owning the user relationship.