OpenAI opens the GPT Store

OpenAI opened the GPT Store, a marketplace inside ChatGPT for custom “GPTs” — chatbots built by other users and companies on top of GPT-4, tailored to specific tasks with their own instructions, data and connections to external tools. The store organised submissions into categories such as writing, research, programming and education, with a community leaderboard surfacing popular entries, and OpenAI said several million GPTs had already been created ahead of launch.

Access required a paid ChatGPT plan — Plus, Enterprise, or a newly introduced Team tier priced at $25 per user per month, positioned as a lighter-weight alternative to Enterprise for smaller organisations. OpenAI said a revenue-sharing programme for US-based GPT builders, paying out according to user engagement, would follow.

The launch had originally been announced for November 2023, unveiled at OpenAI’s first developer conference days before the board’s attempt to remove Sam Altman as chief executive. The store slipped by two months as the company absorbed the fallout of that crisis, a delay OpenAI acknowledged obliquely at the time by saying “a few unexpected things” had kept it busy.

The GPT Store did not become the platform shift some had anticipated. Discovery and monetisation for third-party GPTs remained limited, and OpenAI’s own product roadmap shifted over the following year toward native features, custom instructions and, later, more capable agentic tools built directly into ChatGPT rather than a marketplace of user-made variants — leaving the store as a lower-profile part of the product than its launch suggested.