If you pay $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus — or even just use the free version occasionally — last week produced the clearest picture yet of what you're paying into. OpenAI's audited 2025 financials leaked to writer Ed Zitron and were confirmed by multiple independent reports: $13.07 billion in revenue in 2025, against $34 billion in expenses. For every dollar ChatGPT earned, the company spent $2.60 to earn it.

Most headlines are calling it a $38.5 billion loss, and that number is technically correct. But it needs context. OpenAI converted itself from a nonprofit to a for-profit company in 2025, and that legal restructuring triggered a $41.55 billion accounting charge — not real money spent, just a number that moved on a balance sheet as the corporate structure changed. Strip that out and the actual operating loss — what the business itself costs to run — was $20.92 billion. Still enormous. But different in kind.

The number that surprised me

More than any single loss figure, this is the number worth sitting with:

Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing service — essentially, the servers ChatGPT runs on. Every time you ask it something, the answer comes from a Microsoft data center. OpenAI paid Microsoft $17.2 billion for that in 2025. Out of $34 billion total. That is not a vendor relationship. That is a dependency.

It's more tangled than just a large contract, too. Microsoft also holds a significant equity stake in OpenAI. The company's largest shareholder is also the company's largest supplier. If that relationship got complicated — pricing changes, competing priorities, terms that shift — OpenAI would have very few places to go quickly. Building alternative data centers takes years and hundreds of billions in capital.

The other side of the ledger

Revenue tripled in a single year. $3.7 billion in 2024 to $13.07 billion in 2025. That is genuinely fast — almost no software company in history has grown at that rate. If costs eventually stabilize while revenue keeps compounding, the math starts to work.

That's the optimistic read, and it isn't nothing. Hardware costs fall over time. Model efficiency improves. Enterprise contracts get renegotiated. There's a real scenario where the gap closes in three to five years.

The less optimistic read: operating losses grew nearly as fast as revenue did. You want the costs to grow slower than the revenue, not in lockstep.

Source spread

• Ed Zitron — Where's Your Ed At — skeptic. First to publish the full numbers. Argues the growth story doesn't justify the structural cost imbalance.
• TechTimes — OpenAI Lost $38.5 Billion in 2025 — skeptic. Focuses on Azure dependency; frames the Microsoft relationship as a strategic fragility.
• MLQ News — Leaked OpenAI Financials Reveal $21B Operating Loss — builder. More measured; usefully separates operating loss from the inflated net loss figure.
• Cryptobriefing — OpenAI's 2025 Financials Reveal $13B Revenue, $34B Costs — hype. Leads with the revenue growth story; reads the losses as standard tech-scale-up behavior.

What's real

• Tripling revenue in one year is remarkable by any measure. Enterprise API and subscription growth is genuine — not inflated by accounting.
• The $38.5 billion "headline" loss is primarily a one-time accounting event from restructuring. The operational reality is bad but not catastrophically so relative to the company's actual cash position and funding.
• An IPO creates accountability. After listing, OpenAI will file quarterly reports. Costs blowing up or revenue flattening will be visible — to investors, journalists, and you.
• ChatGPT has 200M+ weekly active users. That scale creates real pricing power. The question is when they use it, not whether.

What deserves a side-eye

• Half of total expenses going to one vendor who also holds equity is a structural fragility with no quick fix. It cannot be diversified away in a single year.
• Operating losses grew at roughly the same rate as revenue in 2025. That's the wrong direction for a company trying to make the math work.
• These financials were leaked, not disclosed. OpenAI has not voluntarily published its finances. You're relying on a leak to understand the company you pay every month.
• The IPO creates pressure to satisfy public investors, who will expect a path to profitability. That pressure flows downstream to you: higher prices, more ads, or more restricted free tiers.

What to do about it

• If you're a paying subscriber: lock in the $20/month while it's there. The financials point toward a price increase in the next 12–18 months once the IPO places investor expectations on quarterly earnings.
• Watch the free tier changes. How fast ads expand on the free version is the most direct real-time signal of how much revenue pressure OpenAI is feeling. If it accelerates, the pressure is real.
• Know your alternatives before you need them. Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), and Copilot (Microsoft) are all real products. If one company's pricing or model behavior shifts in a direction you dislike, you have somewhere to go — but better to try them now than scramble later.
• Cross-check anything you'd act on. This isn't unique to OpenAI, but it sharpens now: a company under investor pressure to grow revenue has stronger incentives to keep you engaged and subscribed. That doesn't mean the answers are wrong. It means the same thing ads always mean. Know whose interests you're navigating.

Further reading

• Ed Zitron — OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025 — original reporting with full figures
• TechTimes — OpenAI Lost $38.5 Billion in 2025: Audited Financials Expose $17B Azure Dependency
• MLQ News — Leaked OpenAI Financials Reveal $21B Operating Loss on $13B Revenue in 2025
• Benzinga — Leaked OpenAI Financials Reveal A Stunning $38.5 Billion Loss
• Cryptobriefing — OpenAI's 2025 Financials Reveal $13B Revenue, $34B Costs