OpenAI review: A data-backed look
Explore OpenAI's adoption trends, delivery performance, and reliability metrics to determine if it's the right AI solution for your team's content generation and development needs.
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OpenAI overview
OpenAI builds AI tools that generate and understand text, images, audio, and video. ChatGPT, its core product, helps with writing, coding, research, and task automation. It's designed for professionals, teams, and developers who want to move faster and scale output. Compared to others, OpenAI offers broader capabilities in one platform, with a strong mix of usability, performance, and flexibility across general-purpose creative and analytical tasks.
How much do businesses spend on OpenAI?
The chart below illustrates average quarterly spending on OpenAI across different business sizes.
Mid-market and enterprise businesses demonstrate the highest spending on OpenAI, with quarterly expenditure showing relatively stable levels with slight fluctuations throughout the measured period.
Micro businesses display steady growth in spending, showing a consistent upward trajectory across all quarters.
Small and medium-sized enterprises maintain moderate spending levels with gradual increases over time.
The data reveal a clear spending hierarchy, where larger organizations consistently maintain higher investment levels in OpenAI's platform. All business segments show positive growth patterns, indicating broad adoption across different organizational sizes.
Who is OpenAI best for?
The chart below breaks down OpenAI’s user base by industry and business size.
Micro businesses represent the largest portion of OpenAI's user base, making up the dominant segment of platform adoption. Small and medium-sized companies constitute a significant portion of users, while mid-market and enterprise businesses represent a substantial but smaller segment.
OpenAI key features
Advanced language models
- What it does: Uses deep learning to generate, interpret, and transform human language across text, audio, and images.
- Key benefit: Automates writing, support, and analysis tasks, cutting costs and freeing up teams for higher-impact work.
Multimodal capabilities
- What it does: Processes and generates text, audio, image, and video within a single model.
- Key benefit: Powers richer interactions like visual chat or voice-based apps, improving accessibility and user experience.
Image generation (DALL·E)
- What it does: Generates images and artwork from text prompts using deep learning.
- Key benefit: Speeds up creative workflows in marketing and design by producing visuals on demand.
Speech-to-text and text-to-speech
- What it does: Converts speech to text and back to natural-sounding speech in real time.
- Key benefit: Enables hands-free interaction, improves accessibility, and enhances service channels.
Function calling and code execution
- What it does: Interprets prompts to call external functions or run code within workflows.
- Key benefit: Automates complex tasks like transactions or queries, reducing errors and manual effort.
Embeddings and data analysis
- What it does: Converts data into vectors to detect relationships and patterns for search and analytics.
- Key benefit: Improves search relevance, personalisation, and decision-making with deeper data insights.
Fine-tuning and customization
- What it does: Helps you train models on your data for specific tone, rules, or tasks.
- Key benefit: Boosts relevance and compliance, tailoring AI output to your business needs.
OpenAI pricing
ChatGPT Plans
Plan | Price (USD) | Features |
|---|---|---|
Free | $0/month | Basic access to GPT-4.1 mini, limited usage, file uploads, image generation, and voice mode |
Plus | $20/month | Priority access, extended limits, advanced models (GPT-4.5 preview, OpenAI o3, o4-mini, etc.) |
Pro | $200/month | Unlimited access to latest models (including GPT-4, o1), advanced voice, more compute power |
Team | $30/user/month ($25 annual) | Collaborative workspace, admin tools, latest models, team management |
Enterprise | Custom quote | For large organizations, advanced privacy, analytics, and customizatio |
API Pricing (per 1 million tokens)
Model | Input | Cached Input | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
GPT-4.1 | $2.00 | $0.50 | $8.00 |
GPT-4.1 mini | $0.40 | $0.10 | $1.60 |
GPT-4.1 nano | $0.10 | $0.025 | $0.40 |
GPT-4o | $2.50 | $1.25 | $10.00 |
GPT-4o mini | $0.15 | $0.075 | $0.60 |
OpenAI o3 | $2.00 | $0.50 | $8.00 |
OpenAI o4-mini | $1.10 | $0.275 | $4.40 |
GPT-4.5 preview | $75.00 | $37.50 | $150.0 |
OpenAI pros & cons
OpenAI is a good fit if:
- You need fast, high-quality text generation across documents, chat, and content.
- You produce content at scale for marketing, editorial, or product descriptions.
- You work with structured tasks involving code, data, or logic-based workflows.
- You want multimodal generation, text, image, audio, under one unified provider.
- You integrate AI into digital tools, platforms, or customer-facing products.
- You need robust APIs and developer tools with strong enterprise support.
Consider alternatives if:
- You need fully on-prem or private cloud deployment with no hosted APIs.
- You have internal data policies restricting any third-party processing or storage.
- You want simpler, cheaper tools without advanced general-purpose model overhead.
- You’ve struggled with usage pricing and want predictable, fixed-cost options.