OpenAI India: Downloads and Active Users, Free and Paid

India is ChatGPT's second-largest market by weekly users, with about 100 million weekly actives, but almost none of them pay. There is no official India paid-user count, and every revenue signal points to a very small paying base. Sam Altman gave the 100 million weekly figure in February 2026, ahead of the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi.

The numbers

Metric	Figure	Date	Confidence
Weekly active users	About 100 million	February 2026	High, company-stated
Monthly active users	145 million; 180 million	December 2025; January 2026	Medium
Daily active users	About 65 million	December 2025	Medium
Share of global users	About 16% by one estimate; 9.8% of web traffic by another	December 2025 to 2026	Medium
Gen-AI app downloads	World's largest market in 2025, up 207%, about 20% of global downloads	2025	Medium to high
ChatGPT downloads, peak	Over 24 million, peaking July 2025 (period not stated)	December 2025	Low; period unclear
ChatGPT downloads, recent	About 1.8 million a month	July 2026	Medium
In-app revenue	About $60,000 a day, down from $80,000 in October 2025	July 2026	Medium
Codex usage	Weekly users up about 27x since January 2026	2026	High, company-stated

The two download figures cannot both describe the same period, and I could not resolve the gap from the pages I read. The safer reading is that download growth peaked in 2025 and has cooled since, while usage kept climbing.

Free versus paid

OpenAI does not split India users by plan. The evidence supports three groups.

The free tier holds the large majority of the 100 million. Globally, one estimate puts about 81% of active users on the free tier.

ChatGPT Go on promotion is the second group. Go launched in India at Rs 399 a month in August 2025, then was offered free for 12 months from 4 November 2025 with UPI support. The offer was reported as ended for new sign-ups by February 2026. These users count as active but generate no revenue, and their free year begins to run out from November 2026, which is my inference from the offer terms.

Paying users are the third group: Plus at about Rs 1,499 a month, Pro at about Rs 16,999, plus Business, Edu and Enterprise seats. India generates only about 1% of global in-app purchase revenue while driving about 20% of downloads, and ChatGPT's India revenue fell 33% and 32% in November and December 2025 after the Go promotion started.

A rough bound on paying users

At about $60,000 a day, app-store billing is roughly $1.8 million a month. At a Plus price near $17, that is on the order of 100,000 subscription-equivalents, or about 0.1% of weekly users. This is only a lower-bound illustration. It leaves out web and UPI billing, the gap between gross and net store revenue, and all Business, Edu and Enterprise seats, such as TCS's rollout and the more than 100,000 Edu licences.

Reading it together

In Q2 2026, ChatGPT and Claude together captured nearly 83% of India's AI app revenue, so the paying pool is small but concentrated in these two products. OpenAI's India strategy is to build habit and data depth first and convert later. The test comes as the free Go year ends.