OpenAI Launches the Chat GPT Store

ChatGPT Launches the GPT Store: OpenAI’s Answer to the App Store?

OpenAI has today announced the highly anticipated launch of the GPT Store. The store enables users to create and share custom chatbot apps with GPT-4 and DALL-E 3 without any coding knowledge.

The store features a range of GPTs developed by OpenAI partners and users. Users can also vote for popular and trending GPTs via the community leaderboard.

It’s worth noting that the GPT Store will only be available to ChatGPT Plus, ChatGPT Enterprise, or ChatGPT Team users. Team users can access a private section of the GPT Store detailing GPTs published to their workspaces.

Users also can’t sell custom GPTs just yet, as revenue sharing hasn’t been released.

But OpenAI said:

“In Q1 we will launch a GPT builder revenue program. As a first step, US builders will be paid based on user engagement with their GPTs. We’ll provide details on the criteria for payments as we get closer,”.

OpenAI’s Answer to the App Store? A Hub for Chatbots

From what we’ve seen so far, the GPT Store has the potential to become OpenAI’s answer to the Apple App Store. Apple originally launched the App Store in 2008 with just 500 apps, a year after the release of the iPhone.

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This was a pivotal moment for the company and created a diverse marketplace where developers had an opportunity to sell unique apps and digital experiences to customers directly via their personal devices.

Since then, the App Store has remained a key differentiator for the iPhone as a device and has played a significant role in its early momentum. For instance, in 2007, the iPhone sold 1.39 million units, but in 2008, this increased to 11.63 million after the release of the App Store.

Given that users have already created three million custom versions of ChatGPT since the November 2023 release of GPTs, the GPT Store has the potential to make generative AI tools much more accessible to end users.

For example, OpenAI’s featured GPTs include AllTrail, a tool for finding hiking trails, and Consensus, which is designed to search the results of over 200 million academic papers.

There is also Canva, which was created to design presentations and social posts, and CK-12 Flexi AI Tutor, which can be used to learn about math and science.

This strange mix of capabilities highlights that the GPT Store is situated as a hub of a wide range of custom chatbots that can be used to cover almost any use case.

Ryan McCain, head of Norzer Local and e-Commerce SEO Agency, has been building custom GPTs for the last few months.

He said:

“I have created two custom GTPS so far. One that will create a content outline for you and then generate the content if you wish, and another will carry out research on a market segment’s competitors.

“Community GPTs are powerful because they can now do for a few cents what formerly would cost hundreds and thousands of dollars to carry out — tasks that used to take hours can now take just a few minutes, or even seconds.

“This is great news for the SEO/digital marketing industry, especially those with tight budgets.”

For those who are tempted to start their own creations, he advised:

“Don’t be intimidated. Custom GPTs are super easy to create and require zero coding. All you do is create a long prompt to be used for a specific task, such as ‘I want to create a detailed SEO-optimized content outline/framework for a service page, not a website, to help a local business for whatever keyword is given to help them sell their product/service’.

“As a tip to other builders, when you feed it the raw prompt it will convert it into its own words — but the more you edit it the more ‘off’ it can become.

So if you are editing the original prompt, start in a new Custom GPT instance, rather than re-editing — upload your prompt fresh each time for better results”.

Roadblocks on the Road Ahead

While the GPT Store does look promising, there are a couple of limitations that will hold its development back. The first is OpenAI’s decision to restrict the store to paid ChatGPT users.

This decision alone already dramatically reduces the amount of potential users that are going to use these GPTs as part of their day-to-day lives and workflows.

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Likewise, the absence of revenue share on launch means that, for now, there is no direct financial incentive for developers to invest time into creating custom GPTs. At the same time, the lack of clarity over revenue-sharing options in the future raises questions about whether creating custom GPTs will be worthwhile in the future, too.

The Bottom Line

The more accessible this technology is, the more growth opportunities it has. The GPT Store can potentially provide consumers and enterprises with a central hub of generative AI tools to choose from.

If the GPT Store evolves into a thriving marketplace, then it means that paid ChatGPT users will have access to a wider range of AI-driven solutions than ever before.