- Minimum daily budget in INR: ₹725 per campaign (OpenAI Help Center).
- Three objectives: Views (CPM), Clicks (CPC) and Conversions (oCPC or oCPM). You never pay per conversion.
- OpenAI's recommended starting CPC bid: $3–5 USD, a ceiling, not the price you pay.
- Daily spend can reach 2× your daily budget, but a 7-day week never exceeds 7×.
- Early Indian data (one agency, Sep 2026): about ₹581 CPM and ₹13.67 CPC.
- New self-serve accounts may only advertise in their home country at first.
ChatGPT ads pricing at a glance
| Minimum daily budget (INR accounts) | ₹725 per campaign |
|---|---|
| Minimum daily budget (AED accounts, for UAE) | AED 65 |
| Minimum daily budget (USD accounts) | $25 |
| Views objective | Pay per 1,000 impressions served (CPM) |
| Clicks objective | Pay per valid click (CPC) |
| Conversions objective | Optimised for a conversion event, billed per valid click (oCPC) or per 1,000 impressions (oCPM). Not billed per conversion |
| Recommended starting CPC bid | $3–5 USD maximum bid (OpenAI) |
| Who sets the price | An auction. The final winning auction bid sets the price you pay |
Source: OpenAI Help Center, “Creating campaigns for ChatGPT Ads” and “Ads in ChatGPT: The Basics”, read on 12 November 2026. OpenAI updates these pages often, so check them before you launch.
How the ₹725 minimum actually works
The ₹725 minimum is a daily budget per campaign, not an account fee or a monthly commitment. OpenAI describes the daily budget as an average over a 7-day week (Sunday to Saturday in your account's time zone):
- On a single day, spend can go up to twice your daily budget, so a ₹725 budget can spend up to ₹1,450 on a strong day.
- Across the week, spend will not exceed seven times the daily budget, which is ₹5,075 at the minimum.
- If a campaign uses its weekly allowance early, it can stop delivering until the next budget week, even while it shows as active.
Running one campaign at the minimum for a full month therefore costs at most about ₹22,000. You can also set a campaign-total budget instead, which OpenAI calls the stricter control for total spend.
CPM vs CPC vs Conversions: which should you pick?
| Views (CPM) | Best when you want your brand seen next to relevant questions, such as a new launch. You pay for impressions even if nobody clicks. |
|---|---|
| Clicks (CPC) | Best for most Indian small and mid-size businesses starting out. You only pay when someone reaches your site or WhatsApp page, so a weak ad costs you little. |
| Conversions (oCPC / oCPM) | Best once tracking works and you have results to optimise toward, such as leads or purchases. You still pay per click or impression; the system just aims for people likely to convert. |
The objective is fixed once a campaign is created. To switch, OpenAI says to create a new campaign with the objective you want.
What Indian advertisers are actually paying
OpenAI publishes the rules, not the prices. The only public rupee figures we could verify come from an Indian agency describing its own campaign:
| Average CPM | ₹581.22 |
|---|---|
| Average CPC | ₹13.67 |
| Click-through rate | 4.25% |
| Context | One Clicks campaign, growth-marketing and SEO topics in Indian metros, running since 2 September 2026 (upGrowth) |
Treat this as one data point, not a benchmark. The auction was new and lightly contested, and the agency itself expects prices to rise as more advertisers join. Some blogs quote India CPCs of ₹70–₹450 or CPMs above ₹1,000 without saying where the numbers came from, so we don't repeat them.
For comparison, press reports put US CPMs at about $60 during the early 2026 pilot, falling to roughly $25–45 by April 2026 (reported by Digiday and others, collected by Sprites). India's auction is far cheaper today, mainly because fewer advertisers are bidding.
Why your bid isn't your price
Your maximum bid is the most you are willing to pay, not what you are charged. OpenAI says auctions decide which eligible ads are shown and that “the final winning auction bid sets the price you pay”. Ads Manager can also show bid-strength guidance telling you whether a bid is likely to limit delivery.
OpenAI's $3–5 recommendation is in US dollars. In a less crowded Indian auction, the price actually paid has been far lower (the ₹13.67 figure above). Start near OpenAI's guidance, watch your average CPC in Ads Manager, and lower the ceiling if you are winning comfortably.
Price also depends on relevance. OpenAI says ads are matched on the conversation's context, your landing page, title, copy and the context hints you give each ad group. A clear ad that answers the user's question tends to win more auctions at the same bid.
Things that catch Indian advertisers out
- Home-country limit. OpenAI says some new self-serve accounts can initially advertise only in their home country. An Indian account may not be able to target the UAE or US at first, whatever you select.
- Spend reporting lag. Impressions and clicks refresh about every 15 minutes, but spend can lag 7–8 hours. A spend of zero doesn't mean nothing has been charged.
- Crawler visits. OpenAI's ad-review crawlers visit landing pages with your tracking parameters. Analytics tools may count these as paid visits, but they are not billed clicks.
- Account approval comes first. Ads only deliver once account verification, billing, review and campaign settings are all complete.
- Context hints are not keywords. OpenAI says they guide matching but are not exact match and don't guarantee delivery in specific conversations.
A sensible first budget
- One Clicks campaign at ₹725–₹1,500 a day, targeting India (or your city where location targeting is available).
- Two or three ad groups, each built around one theme of questions your buyers ask, with its own context hints.
- UTM tags on every landing URL, plus OpenAI's conversion measurement, so you can see cost per enquiry rather than just cost per click.
- Run two to three weeks before judging. Compare cost per enquiry with your Meta and Google numbers.
- Then decide: scale the themes that convert, or move to a Conversions campaign once you have enough results.
Want us to run the test? See our ChatGPT ads agency page, or read the wider ChatGPT ads in India guide for launch dates, eligibility and rules.
