How Much Does It Cost to Advertise on ChatGPT? Minimum Budget, Cost per Click and How You Pay

Updated October 22, 2026. ChatGPT Ads values are in beta and may change. Always confirm amounts in your Ads Manager.

Short answer

There is no fixed price to advertise on ChatGPT. It is bought through an auction, with no monthly fee: you pay for what is delivered, after it is delivered.

The reference numbers published by OpenAI:

• Minimum budget: US$ 25 per day per campaign, for accounts billed in dollars.
• Recommended starting bid in Clicks campaigns: between US$ 3 and US$ 5 per click.

That means you can run a real test with a budget far below the US$ 200,000 that early advertisers were required to commit in the first months of the program.

How is advertising on ChatGPT charged?

There are three campaign objectives:

Billing is postpaid: OpenAI charges you after delivering the ads. To activate campaigns you must complete the billing profile (business name, address and email for invoices) and the payment method.

What is the minimum budget?

According to OpenAI's help center, the current minimum is US$ 25 per day per campaign. That minimum depends on your account's billing currency. For example, an analysis by the British consultancy Whito found that for accounts in pounds the minimum is £ 15.

For Argentina, we could not confirm a minimum expressed in pesos in the public documentation. So do not convert the US$ 25 to pesos and treat it as an official price: look at the minimums table your own Ads Manager shows when you create the campaign.

Two rules about the daily budget worth knowing:

• It is an average. In a single day it can spend up to double what you set.
• In any seven-day period, spend does not exceed seven times the daily budget.

How much does a click cost?

OpenAI recommends starting with a maximum bid of US$ 3 to US$ 5 per click. Market data points in the same direction: the agency StubGroup, which invested its own money and its clients' money, reported in August 2026 average costs per click of US$ 2 to US$ 5 in US accounts. It also noted that the platform warns that the ad may not deliver if the maximum bid is below US$ 3.

Two clarifications so you do not misread those numbers:

1. A bid is a maximum, not the actual cost. The auction is second-price and weighs relevance, so often a click costs less than your ceiling.
2. These are US data. There are no months of history in Argentina yet, and nobody can tell you today what the local average cost will be.

What advertising cost in other countries: Mexico, Brazil, the United States and the United Kingdom

This table brings together OpenAI's minimums and the numbers published by advertisers and agencies. They are third-party data, from few accounts and different periods. They give an order of magnitude, not a promise.

Sources for the minimums: AdTech México, August 31, 2026. Sources for the costs: Marktech (September 22, 2026) and Search Engine Journal (September 8, 2026).

What follows from those numbers

• The cost-per-click range is huge. Search Engine Journal compiled advertiser cases with CPC from under US$ 3 to nearly US$ 22. Synter measured US$ 5.10 in the United Kingdom and US$ 10.62 in the United States, and much more in Australia and New Zealand, with low volume. The US$ 3 to US$ 5 bid OpenAI recommends is a starting point, not an average or a benchmark.
• CPM is high compared with other channels. Hostinger reported a CPM above US$ 65 with almost US$ 70,000 invested, and the B2B case measured US$ 64.34. In Brazil, by contrast, Marktech had a CPM of R$ 32 to R$ 36 across accounts.
• Cost is not stable. In the account Marktech measured in Brazil, weekly CPC started at R$ 1.03, rose to R$ 4.09 in week four when the budget was increased, and fell to R$ 2.49 in week six when it was reduced. The agency attributes this to auction dynamics, which were still filling up.
• CTR is low compared with search. In Brazil CTR was 1.33% against a median of 8.98% on Google Search in July. And cost per click was similar: R$ 2.40 against R$ 2.52 (different periods, so the comparison is indicative). In the United States, the e-commerce case measured a CTR of 0.94% and the B2B case 0.7%.
• Sales depend enormously on the case. The high-ticket e-commerce store from Common Thread Collective invested US$ 9,620 and estimated a return of 3.3 to 6.8 times the investment depending on the attribution model. The B2B case paid for 336 clicks (about 7,000 Canadian dollars) and of the 146 organizations it could identify, only 5 fit its ideal customer.

Moral for Argentina: the first week is usually the cheapest and the most misleading. In Brazil, the conversion rate fell 88% between the first and fourth weeks, and was still 78% lower in the sixth, according to the agency itself. It is a single case and the interpretation of whoever measured it, but it is worth planning the test for several weeks.

Sample accounts

These calculations are ours, made with the published figures. They are not expected results, they only show the arithmetic.

A campaign does not have to last a full month or spend the maximum every day. You can set dates and a total budget.

From clicks to sales: the cost that matters

Cost per click is an intermediate figure. What decides whether it pays off is how much it costs you to win a customer:

A hypothetical example: if you pay US$ 4 per click and 2 out of every 100 visitors buy, each sale costs you US$ 200 in advertising. If your product leaves US$ 80 in margin, that campaign loses money, however cheap the click looks.

And here is a note of caution. In a test published by StubGroup with about 1,500 users, ChatGPT Ads traffic had a conversion rate of 0.21%, against 3.71% for Google Ads traffic to the same site, and with less time on site. It is a single case, from a single account, and the agency itself notes that the platform is very new. But it is a reminder that traffic from this channel does not behave like a Google search. Measure with your own data.

Costs that do not show up in the dashboard

• Creatives and landing page: a specific landing page per topic is advisable.
• Measurement: pixel, Conversions API and properly configured UTM tagging.
• Analysis time: reporting is limited, you cannot see the conversations or the topics that triggered your ad.
• Exchange rate and taxes: if your account bills in dollars, check with your accountant how it affects your company.

How to avoid overspending

1. Start with a single campaign and a low daily budget.
2. Use a daily budget while you learn. Keep in mind that if you switch a campaign from a total budget to a daily one, you cannot go back.
3. Set an account limit. Eligible postpaid accounts can set a daily limit for the whole account under Billing, Account limits.
4. Decide in advance how much you are willing to pay for a customer and cut whatever does not reach it.
5. Do not draw conclusions from little data. Give the test time and compare against your current cost per customer on Google or Meta.

Is it expensive or cheap compared with Google Ads?

It depends on what you look at. In Brazil, one agency's cost per click (R$ 2.40) came very close to the July Google Search median (R$ 2.52), but CTR was much lower (1.33% against 8.98%), and in the United States there were cases of US$ 4 to US$ 10 per click. So the click is not necessarily cheaper, and it brings less volume. The context also changes: the person is talking to an AI, not typing a short search, and you have less targeting control and less data. We cover the differences in our ChatGPT Ads vs Google Ads guide.

If you want to calculate a test budget with your real margins and your current cost per customer, at We make it Lab we build it with you before you spend a peso.

Sources

• OpenAI help center: creating campaigns and billing and payments.
• Forbes Argentina, October 16, 2026 (recommended bid of US$ 3 to US$ 5).
• MarTech, "A 7-step guide to running ads on ChatGPT", August 11, 2026 (average cost per click, conversion test, per-click charging on conversions; US data).
• Whito, October 8, 2026 (minimum in pounds).
• OpenAI, expansion to 26 countries, October 21, 2026, via PPC Land.
• Adweek on the initial US$ 200,000 commitment.
• AdTech México, August 31, 2026 (minimums in Mexico, Brazil, the US and the UK) and AdTech México, August 28, 2026 (reported CPM in Mexico).
• Marktech, "ChatGPT Ads in Brazil: CTR, CPC and lessons from six weeks", September 22, 2026 (preliminary data from one agency).
• Search Engine Journal, "6 Months Into ChatGPT Ads, Advertisers Still Don't Know What 'Good' Looks Like", September 8, 2026 (US cases and Synter).