OpenAI’s India-first Go tier

To me, @OpenAI’s 🇮🇳-first Go tier is a live experiment in LLM unit economics, not a land grab. ₹399 with @UPI_NPCI removes payment friction while they test how much GPT‑5 you can subsidize with rate limit shaping and model cascades.👇

I read the fine print: ₹399 per month buys GPT‑5 with around 10x higher message, image, and file upload quotas, plus 2x longer memory than free.

Exclusions matter: No legacy 4o, no Sora, no Connectors. INR pricing is standard now and UPI shows up at checkout. Rollout is India-only with a learn first, expand later posture, though Stripe messed up a bit.

Positioning checks out: Plus is ₹1,999 and Pro is ₹19,900. Gemini Advanced is about ₹1,950 and Copilot Pro about ₹2,000. This is a mid capability, low cost plan tuned for students and SMBs, and for WhatsApp access more than power features.

The packaging and the rails are new.

Under $5 for GPT‑5 hints at aggressive inference economics: Think distillation to cheaper paths, cached retrieve and refine, speculative decoding, and traffic shaping to keep peak GPU burn in check. The GPU accountants are smiling.

That 2x memory likely means a larger per-user long term memory store as opposed to a bigger context window. Good for continuity. It also adds read and write ops to memory stores and safety filters, so they are budgeting those tokens too.

Skipping 4o, Sora, and Connectors trims variable cost per user and avoids messy licensing or tool integration attack surfaces at this price. Especially with Sora access, the costs will add up.

Strategically, this leans on a growth market where card failures and FX markups wrecked conversion, and UPI closes that gap. If free to paid in India nudges up even a little, OpenAI gets scale data on code switching, transliteration, and long tail tasks, while stress testing safety outside English.

Watch the ripple effects: The free tier likely tightens. Plus and Pro get sold on thinking, agents, and video. A new anchor under ₹500 means open source frontends will have to beat this on value, not just price. I have a feeling this resets expectations. Perplexity’s deal with Airtel set the stage, but OpenAI doesn’t can stand alone.