The GPT Store is supposed to land sometime early 2024, as early as January.
They plan to eventually offer monetization. Will OpenAI pay creators based on the number of conversations people use? People might pay to access a Custom GPT, like an added subscription.
I'm not going to wait for OpenAI to start handing out checks. They have a lawsuit to contend with. They won't be paying out creators until the copyright matter is settled. Frankly, that could take years.
So, how do we monetize today? Let's explore four options for monetizing a Custom GPT that you can apply today!
1. Paid External Services with Actions
Formerly called Plugins, Actions allow a Custom GPT to connect to external services. They can interact with the API in the same way programs or user-interfaces interact. Really powerful.
Read Official Documentation on Actions
One of the biggest challenges with LLMs is that they don't always have the most recent information. You can enable the browser, but it kinda sucks still. Doesn't render JavaScript, complains about long responses (don't get me started about ChatGPT being lazy).
If you have your own private data, like a private blog or newsletter which requires payment or at least an email opt-in, you could expose that data through a Custom GPT to your paid subscribers.
The flow is like this:
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User engages with the Custom GPT. You'd still need to get the users to the Custom GPT.
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The Custom GPT asks them to log in to your platform. Maybe it's a custom platform, maybe beehiiv or convertkit or something else (maybe PyroPrompts?). ChatGPT sends the user to the site.
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The customer would buy if they haven't already, then authorize ChatGPT to read from the platform.
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The platform navigates the user back to ChatGPT and now it has access.
And it's not just read access, it can also write to the platforms, make updates, change things.
I can see a world in which the New York Times and other news publications do exactly this so they control the articles instead of models being trained on their articles. Subscribers can pay for access or ChatGPT access and proprietary data providers can get paid.
Make money by having a curated data set and enabling easy querying on it for RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) with Embeddings. Knowledge files don't support embeddings, which kinda sucks (this will probably change). It would be great if ChatGPT could ask questions to other platforms and they could do the embeddings, look up in their sources and respond with relevant data. Usable for wikipedia, recipes, books, your emails. Anything, really. PyroPrompts is beginning to work with a News Provider. Let me know if you want access to same-day news in your prompts, we can make it happen.
You could have a service that assists with scheduling and uploading content to social networks so users don't need to hook into multiple or pay the X API Cost ($100/month).
2. Advertisements
What would the internet be without advertisements? AI has, so far, not been overtaken by ads. It's only a matter of time.
If you are beginning to get significant traffic on your Custom GPT, you could get sponsors.
Get a sponsor for a month, list your sponsors in a Knowledge File, rotate out the Knowledge File every month with your new sponsors.
AI would have the benefit of doing it more organically than display ads. Some podcasters do this really well, embedding the ad in their conversation instead of it being a separate segment.
3. Sales through GPT
Make a Custom GPT be your store-front or be an affiliate.
Load all your product information, some sales frameworks and scripts.
You could hook up to Stripe or LemonSqueezy through Actions or just tell the Custom GPT the URLs of the Stripe and LemonSqueezy Product Payment Pages.
Or link to specific services with your affiliate link.
It can be tough to scale a sales team, tough to train a sales team, tough to handle all the conversations. A Custom GPT will scale really well, but it won't do outreach for you... yet!
4. Tips
If you create something really great, that people love. You can ask them to pay.
That's exactly what Nick Dobos, @NickADobos on X has done with hit GPT Tavern and Grimoire GPTs and he's brought in thousands of dollars.
He's still wildly underpaid for what Grimoire can do (powerful coding GPT), but it's impressive anyway. Nick doesn't run the compute, he just has the instructions and files uploaded to the Custom GPT.
If you want your users to pay, have the GPT mention occasionally that they can tip. People won't ever pay you if you don't ask them to.
Try This
Take a Private GPT you have and play around with what injecting fake ads or affiliate links might look like. What are the bounds you find acceptable? What do you even find useful?
