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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI is currently growing WAUs at ~122.8% annualized growth (down from ~461.8% just 10 months ago).

Assuming their growth rate is getting close to stabilizing and will be at ~100% for 3 years to end of 2028 - that'd be $104B in revenue, on 6.4B WAUs.

I wouldn't bank on either of those numbers - but Oracle and Nvidia kind of need to bank on it to keep their stocks pumped.

Their growth decay is around 20% every 2 months - meaning - by this time next year, they could be closer to 1.2B WAUs than to 1.6B WAUs, and the following year they could be closer to 1.4B WAUs than to 3.2B WAUs.

Impressive, for sure, but still well bellow Google and Facebook, revenue much lower and growth probably even.

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They don't need to grow users if their acv increases or they grow their enterprise or API businesses

And of course I might pay $20/month for ChatGPT and another $20/month for sora (or some hypothetical future b2c app)

Codex is my current favorite code reviewer (compare to bug bot and others), although others have had pretty different experiences. Codex is also my current favorite programming model (although it's quite reasonable to prefer Claude code with sonnet 4.5). I would happily encourage my employer to spend even more on OpenAI tools, and this is ignoring the API spend that we have (also currently increasing)

OpenAI don't monetize the vast majority of their users yet. But the unit costs are really low, and once they start monetizing the free tier with ads, they'll be wildly profitable.

"OpenAI cannot actually afford to pay $60 billion / year" the article states with confidence. But that's the level of revenue they'd be pulling in from their existing free users if monetized as effectively as Facebook or Google. No user growth needed.

And it seems this isn't far off, given the Walmart deal. Of course they'll start off with unobtrusive ad formats used only in situations where the user has definite purchase intent, to make the feature acceptable to the users, and then tighten the screws over time.

Except google and facebook have locked in numbers at times of virtually no competition before they started scaling up ads. If Open AI starts scaling ads next year they will churn people at a rate that will not be offset by growth and will either plateau or more likely lose user numbers, as their product has no material edge to alternatives in the market.

I disagree with Zitron’s analysis on many points, but I don’t see Open AI achieving the numbers it needs. Investors backing it must have seen something in private disclosure to be fronting this much money. Or more precisely, I need to believe they have seen something and are not fronting all this money just based on well wishes and marketing.

Most people don't choose by blind taste test. How intrusive do those ads have to get before it overwhelms habit and familiarity? OpenAI might be betting on enough of its 800m and growing weekly users sticking around long enough to moot churn until a liquidity event pays everyone off.

We should also consider the $2,000/month and $20,000/month plans rolling out in the future.

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