The one hard number available at launch is the daily budget floor: self-serve campaigns in the ChatGPT Ads Manager can start with a budget as low as ₹725 per day. Everything above that floor — actual cost-per-click, competitive density by category, and how pricing evolves once all of the 50-plus launch-week brands are running campaigns simultaneously — is genuinely unknown at this early stage, and any specific benchmark being quoted this soon after launch deserves scepticism.
A daily minimum of ₹725 is deliberately accessible, roughly comparable to a modest Google Ads test budget for a small or mid-size Indian business. This is a meaningful signal about what OpenAI is optimising for at launch: broad advertiser adoption and real bidding data across many categories, not maximising revenue per advertiser in the first weeks.
Based on how comparable auction-based ad platforms have evolved (Google Search, Meta, LinkedIn), expect cost to be shaped primarily by three factors once enough advertisers are active: category competitiveness (how many advertisers are bidding into similar conversation contexts), ad relevance and quality signals (how well your creative and landing page match the conversations you're targeting), and overall platform inventory relative to advertiser demand, which will shift as OpenAI decides whether and how to expand beyond Free and Go tier placements.
Being an early advertiser in a new auction-based ad system has historically meant lower competition and lower costs before other advertisers in your category catch on — this was true in the early days of Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads. Whether that pattern repeats for ChatGPT Ads in India is not guaranteed, but it is a reasonable argument for running a small, low-risk test sooner rather than waiting for the category to mature and prices to potentially rise with competition.
What to ignore: any confident claim about "average ChatGPT Ads CPC in India" published in the first few weeks after launch. There is not yet enough advertiser volume or public data for such a number to be meaningful, and early figures circulating from a handful of launch advertisers are not a reliable benchmark for a different category or audience.