“We’re launching ChatGPT Go, a new low-cost subscription plan. This will initially be available for users in India only,” OpenAI said in a blog post on August 18, 2025, adding, “This subscription is initially available in India only. Other countries and regions may be eligible in the future.”
For Rs 399 per month (including GST), ChatGPT Go provides everything included in the Free Plan, plus more messages, larger file uploads, expanded image generation, access to advanced data analysis, longer memory for more personalized responses, and availability on web, mobile (iOS and Android), and desktop (macOS and Windows).
According to OpenAI, ChatGPT Go offers 10 times higher message limits compared to the free plan, in addition to access to features previously limited to higher subscription tiers. The new plan has been designed specifically for Indian users, reflecting the country’s rapid adoption of AI technologies.
“ChatGPT Go is designed for people in India who want greater access to ChatGPT’s advanced capabilities at a more affordable price,” the release said.
ChatGPT Go
OpenAI said ChatGPT Go gives you more access to its most popular features: more GPT-5 messages, multimodal tools like image generation and file uploads, and longer memory—at an affordable price point of Rs 399 per month. ChatGPT Plus, at Rs 1,999 per month, is designed for advanced users: it includes expanded access to thinking and legacy models (e.g., 4o) and advanced tools like deep research, agent mode, and Sora video creation.
Subscriptions Can Be Paid Using UPI
The company also confirmed that all ChatGPT subscriptions can now be paid for using Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a move expected to make access easier across India. “ChatGPT Go is geo-restricted to India at launch, and is able to be subscribed to by credit card or UPI,” the company said.
However, at the time of writing, the company’s website states: “We’re currently experiencing an issue processing UPI payments. UPI has been temporarily disabled. We expect to resolve this within 12–24 hours.”
ChatGPT Go joins OpenAI’s existing subscription tiers—ChatGPT Plus at Rs 1,999 per month, which offers faster performance and higher usage limits, and ChatGPT Pro at Rs 19,900 per month for professionals and enterprises requiring large-scale, customized access to advanced models.
Nick Turley, Vice President and Head of ChatGPT, in a post on social platform X on August 19, 2025, said, “We just launched ChatGPT Go in India, a new subscription tier that gives users in India more access to our most popular features: 10x higher message limits, 10x more image generations, 10x more file uploads, and 2x longer memory compared with our free tier. All for Rs 399.”
“All users in India will now see prices for subscriptions in Indian Rupees, and can now pay through UPI. Making ChatGPT more affordable has been a key ask from users! We’re rolling out Go in India first and will learn from feedback before expanding to other countries,” Turley added.
OpenAI CEO on India and the GPT-5
India, currently OpenAI’s second-largest market, could soon become its largest globally, CEO Sam Altman said earlier this month as the company rolled out its next-generation model, GPT-5. Describing India as an “incredibly fast-growing” market, Altman noted the remarkable pace at which Indian citizens and businesses are adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI).
“India is our second-largest market in the world after the US, and it may well become our largest market. It’s incredibly fast-growing, but what users are doing with AI, what citizens of India are doing with ChatGPT is really remarkable, the way it is being integrated into people’s lives and businesses, starting new companies. We are especially focused on bringing products to India, working with local partners to make artificial intelligence work great for India,” Altman had reportedly said.
“GPT-5 is really the first time that I think one of our mainline models has felt like you can ask a legitimate expert, like a PhD-level expert, anything… We wanted to simplify it and make it accessible. We wanted to make it available in our free tier for the first time,” Altman said.
OpenAI’s GPT-5
Earlier this month, on August 7, 2025, OpenAI launched GPT-5, describing it as its most intelligent and capable artificial intelligence system to date. “Our smartest, fastest, most useful model yet, with built-in thinking that puts expert-level intelligence in everyone’s hands. We are introducing GPT-5, our best AI system yet. GPT-5 is a significant leap in intelligence over all our previous models, featuring state-of-the-art performance across coding, math, writing, health, visual perception, and more,” OpenAI announced while launching its new version.
“GPT-5 is our strongest coding model to date. It shows particular improvements in complex front-end generation and debugging larger repositories. It can often create beautiful and responsive websites, apps, and games with an eye for aesthetic sensibility in just one prompt, intuitively and tastefully turning ideas into reality. Early testers also noted its design choices, with a much better understanding of things like spacing, typography, and white space,” OpenAI said while explaining the latest model’s coding abilities.
In health, GPT-5 scored significantly higher on OpenAI’s HealthBench evaluation, offering more precise, contextual, and proactive support to users—though OpenAI stressed it is not a substitute for medical professionals.
“GPT-5 is our best model yet for health-related questions, empowering users to be informed about and advocate for their health. The model scores significantly higher than any previous model on HealthBench, an evaluation we published earlier this year based on realistic scenarios and physician-defined criteria. Compared to previous models, it acts more like an active thought partner, proactively flagging potential concerns and asking questions to give more helpful answers.”
Open added, “The model also now provides more precise and reliable responses, adapting to the user’s context, knowledge level, and geography, enabling it to provide safer and more helpful responses in a wide range of scenarios. Importantly, ChatGPT does not replace a medical professional—think of it as a partner to help you understand results, ask the right questions in the time you have with providers, and weigh options as you make decisions.”
According to the company, GPT-5 achieved 94.6 percent on the 2025 AIME math competition without tools, 74.9 percent on SWE-bench Verified for coding, 84.2 percent on multimodal understanding, and 46.2 percent on HealthBench Hard. In its “Pro” version, designed for extended reasoning, the model set a new record on GPQA, a benchmark of graduate-level science questions, with an 88.4 percent score without tools.
OpenAI said GPT-5’s hallucination rate fell sharply compared with earlier models. “With web search enabled on anonymized prompts representative of ChatGPT production traffic, GPT-5’s responses are around 45 percent less likely to contain a factual error than GPT-4o, and when thinking, GPT-5’s responses are around 80 percent less likely to contain a factual error than OpenAI o3.”
Microsoft Partnership and Ecosystem Expansion
OpenAI’s new model, GPT-5, has also officially gone live across Microsoft’s ecosystem — including Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Azure AI Foundry, and the standalone Copilot app.
“Today, GPT-5 launches across our platforms, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Azure AI Foundry,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a post on X on August 7, 2025. “It’s the most capable model yet from our partners at OpenAI, bringing powerful new advances in reasoning, coding, and chat, all trained on Azure.”
Nadella highlighted how far the collaboration with OpenAI has come. “It’s hard to believe it’s only been two and a half years since @sama (Sam Altman) joined us in Redmond to show the world GPT-4 for the first time in Bing, and it’s incredible to see how far we’ve come since that moment.”
He added, “The pace of progress is only accelerating, and I can’t wait to see what developers, enterprises, and consumers will do with this latest breakthrough.”
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and xAI, in a post on X, warned Nadella that “OpenAI is going to eat Microsoft alive.”
Nadella replied: “People have been trying for 50 years and that’s the fun of it! Each day you learn something new and innovate, partner, and compete. Excited for Grok 4 on Azure and looking forward to Grok 5!”
Speaking on a podcast, Sam Altman recalled how GPT-5 solved a complex email task. “This morning I was testing our new model and I got a question. I got emailed a question that I didn’t quite understand. And I put it in the model, this is GPT-5, and it answered it perfectly.”
“I felt like useless relative to the AI in this thing that I felt like I should have been able to do and I couldn’t. It was really hard. But the AI just did it like that. It was a weird feeling,” Altman said during a podcast.
Drawing a parallel with history, he referenced Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. He said GPT-5 could have “permanent effects” — not in a destructive way, but still significant enough to change the course of things.
In May 2025, OpenAI announced that the data of Indian ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu, and OpenAI API platform users would be stored locally in the country.
The company says the new system should feel less like “talking to AI” and more like engaging with a thoughtful partner capable of PhD-level reasoning.
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