ChatGPT Breezes Past a Quarter Million Dollars Within Days of Launch

Ariel Ariel
5/26/23

This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Streaming Shakeup. Check out the full article for more insights.


The official ChatGPT app rolled out last week and has been one of the most downloaded apps in the US, the only country it was available in, since it launched. It's currently sitting pretty at #3.

As funny as it may sound, ChatGPT is kind of late to the ChatGPT-on-mobile game, which is currently owned by apps like Genie and Ask AI. But a week in, it's showing signs of good healthy growth.

Let's start by looking at downloads:

In its first week on the App Store, ChatGPT made its way into 779K iPhones, according to our estimates. Since the first week was only the US and only the App Store there isn't really much to break down here.

Trend-wise, ChatGPT's downloads rose to a peak of 132K downloads on Saturday and fell a bit after, ending Wednesday with 95K downloads, according to our estimates.

A pretty standard launch trend overall.

Let's continue to revenue, where things get interesting.

In its first week on the App Store, ChatGPT already earned $347K of net revenue from its ChatGPT Plus in-app purchase. And that's net, meaning what OpenAI gets to keep after Apple takes its share.

Given the cost of the in-app purchase, we estimate that there are a little over 20K mobile subscribers as of Wednesday of this week.

If the trend continues, ChatGPT could do the same revenue as 3rd party competitors Genie and Ask AI by the end of its first 30 days.

Seeing these numbers strengthens my conclusion from last week's opinion segment - the next (successful) wave of AI apps using ChatGPT will add functionality on top.

FYI - ChatGPT is expanding beyond the US. This week OpenAI announced rollouts in 44 countries. I'll cover those as soon as we have a few days of data, so make sure you're subscribed to the newsletter.

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The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.

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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.

Tagged: #ai

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