OpenAI Is Going Public. Here's What That Means for Your AI Bill.

I got a text yesterday morning from a guy who runs a landscaping outfit out near Perrysburg. It just said "should I be worried about this OpenAI thing." He's got four people using ChatGPT every day for quotes and follow up emails. He doesn't follow stock market news and he doesn't want to. He asked because he just built half his office workflow on top of a company that's suddenly in the headlines for losing money.

Fair question. Here's the short version of what happened.

OpenAI filed confidentially with the SEC back in May and is aiming to go public as soon as next month at a valuation over a trillion dollars. The filing also put in writing the part nobody talks about out loud. They're bringing in roughly two billion a month and they're still projected to lose about fourteen billion this year. In the first quarter they lost a dollar and twenty two cents for every dollar that came in the door.

Meanwhile Anthropic, the company behind Claude, just posted its first real profit. About 559 million on 10.9 billion in revenue. Same business, opposite direction on the money.

Why a landscaper in Perrysburg should care

Right now you're getting a deal that's almost too good, and you probably already know it. Twenty bucks a month for something that writes your proposals and cleans up every email you send. That price exists because these companies have spent years buying market share with investor money and not worrying much about what it costs them.

Public companies don't get to do that forever. Once there are shareholders and quarterly earnings calls, the pressure to close a fourteen billion dollar hole has to land somewhere. It usually lands as higher prices, tighter caps on the free tier, features that used to be included moving up to a plan that costs more, and ads, which OpenAI already started testing a few days ago.

ChatGPT isn't going anywhere. The twenty dollar version you're running your business on today is a different story. If your whole operation only pencils out at that price, you've got a cost you haven't planned for yet.

The thing I'd actually do this week

Write down what you'd do if your AI bill tripled tomorrow. That's the whole exercise. Not a plan, not a binder, just an honest answer.

If the answer is "I'd pay it, the thing saves me eight hours a week," you're fine. That's a real number and it holds up at sixty a month just like it does at twenty. If the answer is "no idea," that's the work.

Then go check one more thing. All those prompts and templates your team has built up over the last year, are they somewhere you can actually get to them? I run into this constantly. Somebody's best work is locked inside custom GPTs and old chat threads and nowhere else. Copy the good ones into a plain doc. It takes twenty minutes on a slow afternoon. If you ever want to move over to Claude or Gemini or whatever's next, you're moving in a day instead of rebuilding from scratch.

Don't overreact either

Two different people asked me this week if they should hold off on AI until all this shakes out. No. That's like refusing to use email in 1999 because you weren't sure which company was going to win. Keep using it.

The businesses around here that come out ahead on this stuff are the ones treating AI like something they rent. Rent it, get your money's worth out of it every month, keep your own work portable enough to carry out the door.