OpenAI Paid Users Report Ads in ChatGPT
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- A Hacker News user on the £6.99/month ChatGPT plan reported that ads had started appearing in paid conversations, naming Financial Times, Shein, and Amazon Prime Day as three specific examples.
- The ads surfaced during a chat about mobile game tips, and the user said they cancelled their plan in response, writing: "I'm not paying money to see ads."
- Another HN commenter pointed out that ChatGPT's $8 Go tier pricing page has included the line "This plan may include ads" since January, questioning whether the behavior change is genuinely new or just newly noticed.
- The "Tell HN" post titled "OpenAI has started putting ads on paid programs" gathered 12 points and 2 comments within roughly 46 minutes of being submitted.
Why it matters: The user demonstrated the most direct material consequence by cancelling a paid subscription over the ads, and the contextual placement — a chat about mobile game tips surfacing an Amazon Prime Day spot — is the kind of relevance mismatch that erodes trust in a premium product. OpenAI had telegraphed the practice via a January pricing-page disclosure, but user complaints show that buried disclosure and lived experience diverge sharply.
