OpenAI opens the GPT Store

What the store is

The GPT Store is a marketplace for customised versions of ChatGPT, which OpenAI calls GPTs. OpenAI opened it on 10 January 2024, giving users a single place to publish and find these custom chatbots instead of passing them around by hand.^[1][2][3]

The basic idea is a catalogue. A GPT is a version of ChatGPT that someone has set up for a particular purpose, and the store is where those versions are listed so that other people can find them. That makes the chatbot less a single fixed product and more a platform that other people build on.

Background: GPTs and the builder

Custom GPTs were introduced on 6 November 2023, together with GPT Builder, a tool that let users customise ChatGPT.^[1] Before that, the closest thing OpenAI offered was plugins, introduced in March 2023. Plugins were a way of giving the chatbot extra abilities beyond the base model; with the arrival of GPTs, they were superseded, and GPTs took over their role.^[1]

The two launches are best read together. GPT Builder created the raw material, and the store was meant to be the place that material was distributed. In the gap between the two, users were making GPTs faster than there was any organised way to browse them.

The launch

When the store opened on 10 January 2024, more than three million GPTs had already been created.^[1][3] That number is the clearest measure of what the preceding two months looked like: a large volume of custom assistants built before there was any marketplace to hold them.

A marketplace of that size raises an obvious practical question — how anyone finds the useful ones among millions of entries. The store's answer is to organise them as a browsable catalogue rather than a flat list of everything, which is the ordinary shape of an app marketplace.

A delayed opening

OpenAI had first planned to open the GPT Store in November 2023, and the launch was delayed before it finally happened in January.^[3] The delay meant the builder shipped well ahead of the storefront built to distribute what it produced.

Paying the builders

Alongside the store, OpenAI planned a GPT builder revenue programme for the first quarter of 2024, under which builders in the United States would be paid according to how much users engaged with their GPTs.^[3]

That design ties payment to attention rather than to a fixed fee or a direct sale. It tells builders which signal the platform values: whether people actually use what they made. It also makes the store's ranking and discovery mechanics economically important, because engagement is what determines whether a builder earns anything at all.

Why it matters

For users, the store turns a general-purpose chatbot into something closer to a shelf of specialised tools, each set up for a narrower job. For OpenAI, it moves part of the work of deciding what the assistant should do out of the company and into its user base, while keeping the underlying model as the thing everything runs on.

It also gives the custom-assistant boom of late 2023 a permanent shape. Three million GPTs existed before there was anywhere to list them; the store is the arrangement that was built to make that volume navigable, and the revenue programme is the incentive offered to keep it growing.