What ChatGPT ads cost in Australia
OpenAI has never published a rate card, so every number you have read about ChatGPT ad costs came from somebody else's account. That includes this page. I will tell you which numbers come from OpenAI, which come from other people's campaigns, and which nobody actually knows yet.
The short answer
There is no published minimum and no published rate. You set a daily budget and a bid, the same as any auction, and what you pay depends on who else wants the same conversation.
For a first test in Australia I would budget between two and four thousand dollars over six weeks. Not because that is a magic number, but because below about a thousand you will not get enough clicks to tell a real result from noise, and above about five you are scaling something you have not measured yet.
What OpenAI has actually said
- Bidding is cost per click, plus outcome optimised bidding for advertisers who can feed it conversions.
- You can target by platform and geography, upload product feeds, and build custom audiences.
- Ads only appear to logged in adults on the Free and Go tiers. Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education see none, and neither do users OpenAI predicts are under 18.
- Ads are labelled as sponsored and sit visually apart from the assistant's answer.
- Which ad appears is decided by the topic of the conversation, the person's past chats, and how they have interacted with ads before.
- Self serve signup is at ads.openai.com. Larger budgets can also buy through OpenAI's sales team or the big holding groups.
Before you read the table
The figures below come from Australian agencies writing up their own early campaigns through 2026. They are not published by OpenAI and I have not verified them against my own account yet.
Treat them as a range to budget against, not as a quote.
Reported Australian costs, 2026
| What | Reported range | How confident |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per click | $3 to $7 | Several sources agree. Varies hard by category. |
| Cost per thousand impressions | $15 to $40 | One source. Treat as indicative. |
| Click through rate | Around 0.9% | One source, early data, small samples. |
| Practical daily minimum | About $35 a campaign | One source. No published floor. |
Compiled from Australian agency write-ups, September 2026. Replaced with my own numbers as soon as I have them.
How that compares to what you already pay
A Google Ads click for a Brisbane trade, a lawyer or a cosmetic clinic regularly runs past twenty dollars. Plenty of retail and service categories sit under three.
So a reported three to seven dollar click inside ChatGPT is cheap next to the expensive end of search and dear next to the cheap end. Which one you are depends entirely on your category, and that is the first thing to work out before you budget anything.
The reason the click is cheap at all is that most advertisers have not turned up. That is the whole opportunity, and it is temporary.
The setting you cannot change later
When you create the account you choose a country, a billing currency and a time zone. Reported by more than one source: none of the three can be changed afterwards.
If that holds, an Australian business that sets itself up in USD is paying currency conversion on every invoice for the life of the account, and one that picks the wrong time zone has its daily budget resetting in the middle of the trading day.
Get it right the first time. It is thirty seconds of attention that you cannot buy back.
What the money does not buy you yet
- Pixel based attribution. Reporting is aggregated impressions and clicks, so you cannot follow a person from ad to sale the way you can on Google.
- Demographic breakdowns. You cannot see who clicked.
- View through conversions. If the ad influenced a sale without a click, you will not see it.
- A keyword report. There is nothing equivalent to the search terms report, which is the single most useful screen in Google Ads.
So how do you measure it
- Tag every linkUTMs on everything, with a source you will never confuse with anything else. This is the only reliable thread between the ad and your own analytics.
- Ask on the formA 'how did you hear about us' field catches what the tracking cannot. Crude, and right now it beats the alternative.
- Agree the number firstBefore a dollar goes in, write down what a lead is worth and how many you need in six weeks for this to be worth continuing.
- Compare against the same money elsewhereThe real question is never 'did it work'. It is 'did it beat putting the same four thousand dollars into the channels you already run'.
What ChatGPT ads cost, straight answers
Is there a minimum spend?
OpenAI has not published one. Australian advertisers writing up their early campaigns report a practical floor around thirty five dollars a day per campaign. I would not read that as an official minimum, just as the point below which delivery gets unreliable.
Can I run it for a few hundred dollars to see?
You can, and you will learn nothing. At a reported three to seven dollars a click, five hundred dollars buys you somewhere around a hundred clicks. That is not enough to tell a real conversion rate from luck. If five hundred dollars is the budget, put it into something you can already measure.
Is it cheaper than Google Ads?
Per click, for most categories, right now, yes. Per sale, nobody knows yet, including me. Anybody quoting you a return on ad spend for this channel is quoting you a guess.
Will the price go up?
An auction is priced by how many people are bidding, so yes, almost certainly, as more advertisers arrive. That is the argument for testing now rather than the argument for spending big now.
Do you charge a percentage of the spend?
No. A fixed monthly fee agreed before anything starts. A percentage would pay me to spend more of your money, which is the wrong thing to pay me for.
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