ChatGPT ads cost roughly $3 to $5 per click, which is OpenAI's own recommended starting max bid (Digiday, 21 April 2026), and advertisers running real campaigns report average CPCs of about $2 to $5 (Search Engine Land, 10 August 2026). On CPM buys the default maximum bid is $60, though buyers told Digiday they were transacting between $25 and $45 by April 2026 (Digiday, 17 April 2026). There has been no minimum spend since 5 May 2026 (PPC Land, 14 May 2026), and the daily budget floor is $25. So the entry price is low. The cost per outcome is the part nobody can promise you.
Every page ranking for this query recites OpenAI's bid guidance and stops. This one puts the guidance next to what operators say they paid, names the handles, and shows how to work out whether a $4 click can ever pay you back.
What OpenAI's own bid guidance says
Two numbers come from OpenAI rather than from the market.
$3 to $5 recommended starting max CPC. Reported by Digiday on 21 April 2026 when CPC bidding was switched on, and repeated by WebFX on 2 June 2026. John Horn found the interface enforces it softly: "If you set a max CPC lower than $3, the platform will tell you that your ad may not deliver" (Search Engine Land, 10 August 2026).
$60 default maximum CPM bid. The pilot ran at a fixed $60 CPM (PPC Land, 13 April 2026), and $60 remains the default cap on reach buys.
Neither is a rate card. OpenAI has not published one. In a second-price auction your max bid is a ceiling, so what you actually pay depends on the next bid and on how relevant your ad is judged to be, as covered in how ChatGPT ads actually work.
Is there still a minimum spend?
No, and the belief that there is remains the biggest barrier to entry in the category.
The pilot from 9 February 2026 was managed-only with a minimum reported at $200,000 to $250,000. Around 10 April 2026 that dropped to $50,000 (PPC Land, 13 April 2026). On 5 May 2026 self-serve opened to all US businesses and the minimum was removed entirely (PPC Land, 14 May 2026).
What replaces it is a $25 a day budget floor at campaign level (Search Engine Land, 10 August 2026). Two months after the removal, Farhad Divecha of Accuracast was still telling Digiday that "quite a few still think the minimums are too high or the ad platform is still not open to all advertisers" (Digiday, 30 July 2026).
That same Digiday piece reports OpenAI handing out promotional credits to pull new advertisers in, including a $50 credit for spending $50 within 14 days of opening an account, with $100 offers also documented and values still moving around. Divecha's read: "A $100 credit, for example, won't get far, but $500 to $1,000 for the right advertisers could prompt them to try the platform, and realise the benefits." Check what your account is offered before you fund it.
What CPMs actually traded at
The clearest reporting on real transacted prices is Digiday's April piece, headlined on a quote from Ashley Fletcher of Adthena: "It feels like everything is coming down, preparing for a wider auction" (Digiday, 17 April 2026).
From that reporting, all as claims made by named or anonymous buyers rather than by OpenAI:
- Launch rate: $60 CPM.
- Range in April 2026: $25 to $45.
- Jai Amin, chief of media activation at Jellyfish: the $60 base rate holds, but he was seeing averages closer to $45 depending on composition.
- An anonymous ad executive: $35 down to $25 through Criteo in recent days, and as low as $15 in some cases. Ad Age separately reported a $15 CPM, with the routing unclear.
Treat the low end with caution. Those are agency-routed buys at scale, not what a self-serve account with a $25 daily budget will see. The useful signal is the direction: prices fell by more than half in ten weeks as inventory opened up.
What advertisers report paying per click
This is the part nobody has aggregated. The figures below are operator reports from r/PPC threads, quoted with handles. They are self-reported, mostly on small samples, and none of them is a benchmark.
- $2.98 to $3.23 average CPC across three ad groups on a $500 budget, B2B software, u/g_hock, r/PPC, 27 May 2026.
- $4 to $5 CPCs, "maybe half register in GA4", B2B software with long buying cycles, u/easy_mak, r/PPC, 25 June 2026.
- "Our current CPC is below $2 and bids are well below $4.50", an agency running services campaigns, u/TheADLeaf, same thread.
- Unable to enter the auction at a $4.50 bid. "At 4.50 bid it's still saying I can't enter the auction and out bid, are they expecting $10 cpc bids??", u/What_Even_Is_Lyf, same thread. A home goods retail advertiser replied that $4 was enough in her vertical (u/miss_six_o_clock).
- $2 to $5 average CPC across industries, from John Horn's account of early campaigns, Search Engine Land, 10 August 2026.
The spread is the finding. Same platform, same month, one advertiser paying under $2 and another locked out of the auction at $4.50. Vertical and relevance appear to matter more than the headline bid guidance does.
Cost per conversion is thinner ground still. One B2B SaaS advertiser reported "our cost per conversion is between 2-3x higher than what we get from Google Ads" (u/Chanceee, r/PPC, 15 May 2026). Another said the opposite, describing conversions arriving "mid-to-bottom funnel for a much better cost compared to Google in the past" (u/TheADLeaf, June 2026). A third spent $5,000 over three weeks in specialised home services and reported "the complete opposite experience", with lead quality unmoved by any change to the context hints (u/welcometosilentchill, June 2026). No public CPA benchmark exists for this channel, and anyone quoting one is guessing.
What $500 actually bought
The most complete public spend report we found. u/g_hock ran $500 scheduled over three weeks, one product, one landing page, three positioning angles as separate ad groups, and posted the two-week numbers to r/PPC on 27 May 2026:
| Ad group | Impressions | Clicks | CTR | Avg CPC | Conversions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vibe Marketing at Speed | 2,058 | 27 | 1.31% | $2.98 | 4 |
| Replace the Marketing Stack | 1,432 | 31 | 2.16% | $3.23 | 6 |
| Skip the Tag Manager | 461 | 2 | 0.43% | $3.23 | 0 |
Three details matter more than the totals. The budget did not fully deploy: he noted that on current pacing the $500 would not be spent inside three weeks. Delivery was wildly uneven, with the weakest angle getting a fifth of the impressions of the strongest. And the winning ad group was the one that took longest to start serving.
Underspend is the common complaint at small budgets, not overspend. One advertiser said he was "trying to spend $10k/m, but struggling to spend $1k" (u/Film_Sufficient, r/PPC, 16 May 2026).