"Near billion users", yet less than 5% pay them a single penny[1]. Like you said, the vast majority of these will never pay anything, but I'd argue the majority will migrate to the "next" free provider as soon as OpenAI starts inserting too many ads into the product.
I watched my partner switch from OAI to DeepSeek during the last outage and she hasn't been back to OAI since. I am skeptical there is any actual stickyness when basically all of the chatbots do the same thing for the casual user.
I watched my partner switch from OAI to DeepSeek during the last outage and she hasn't been back to OAI since. I am skeptical there is any actual stickyness when basically all of the chatbots do the same thing for the casual user.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/15/openais_chatgpt_popul...