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Startup leaders urge OpenAI CEO to slash prices and localize offerings for India
During Sam Altman’s visit on February 5, top Indian founders and investors pressed for more affordable API pricing and India-specific tiers, highlighting the need for competitive adjustments.
According to Altman, this mindset is not a fringe phenomenon but a “widespread pattern” among young users, particularly those in their teens and twenties.
In a closed-door meeting held during his recent trip to India, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met with prominent startup founders and investors to discuss strategies for deepening OpenAI's footprint in the country.
The key messages from India's tech ecosystem was: to drive mass adoption and better serve the nation's vast developer base, OpenAI must make its offerings, including APIs, more affordable and introduce pricing tiers tailored to the Indian market.
Amid growing competition from emerging players such as the Chinese AI lab DeepSeek—which claims to have developed models rivalling those from OpenAI, Meta, and Google at a fraction of the cost—industry leaders stressed the urgency of recalibrating pricing strategies.
"The current pricing is too high for the Indian market," remarked Snapdeal co-founder Kunal Bahl in a tweet on X (formerly Twitter).
Altman highlighted during a fireside chat with Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw that India is now the second-largest market for ChatGPT, with its user base having tripled over the past year.
The discussion also delved into challenges currently faced by companies using OpenAI's products, and deliberated on the company's future plans for India.
Aakrit Vaish, an advisor to the government's India AI mission, said in a media report that the closed-room discussion covered a range of topics—from making OpenAI's products more accessible in India to overcoming hurdles faced by local companies.
Besides Snapdeal's Kunal Bahl, the meeting was attended by several other influential startup founders, including Unacademy's Gaurav Munjal, Fractal's Srikanth Velamakanni, Ixigo's Aloke Bajpai, and HealthifyMe's Tushar Vashisht.
The session also featured input from notable investors such as Rajan Anandan of Peak XV Partners, Harshjit Sethi, Prayank Swaroop of Accel, and Hemant Mohapatra from Lightspeed Venture Partners.
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