Platform information: ChatGPT Ads are developing and platform requirements can change. This article was last reviewed on 11 September 2026. Shays Media rechecks material platform information before relying on it for client decisions.
Three different numbers, often confused as one
"How much do ChatGPT Ads cost?" usually gets answered with a single figure, and that figure is usually wrong for the person asking it — not because it's inaccurate, but because it's answering a different question than the one they meant.
There are three separate costs involved, and they don't move together:
- OpenAI's platform minimum — the smallest daily budget the platform will accept.
- A commercially meaningful media budget — what you'd actually need to spend to learn anything useful.
- Management fees — what it costs to have someone set up and run the account, if you're not doing it yourself.
Treating these as one number is how budgeting conversations go wrong before a campaign has even launched.
The OpenAI platform minimum
OpenAI's current Create Campaigns documentation lists a minimum daily budget of £15 for GBP accounts and $25 for USD accounts. That's a platform floor, not a recommendation — it's the smallest daily amount Ads Manager will let you set, not a figure anyone should read as "enough to test with." Campaign-level total budgets also exist alongside daily budgets, but this article focuses on the daily-budget minimum, since that's the figure that actually sets the floor.
This number should be rechecked before you rely on it. Platform minimums are exactly the kind of detail that changes as Ads Manager, still in beta, develops.
How daily budgets actually get spent
Before working out a monthly figure, it's worth understanding how OpenAI actually bills against a daily budget, because it isn't a strict daily cap.
Current OpenAI guidance describes a daily budget as an average over a seven-day period, not a hard per-day ceiling. In practice that means:
- billed spend on an individual day can reach up to twice your selected daily budget;
- but spend across the applicable seven-day period won't exceed seven times your daily budget;
- and delivery that goes unused on a lower-spend day can be picked up later in the same seven-day period;
- changing your daily budget partway through a seven-day period can affect, and prorate, the applicable seven-day limit, so a mid-week budget change won't necessarily give you a clean multiple of the new figure for that period.
So a £15/day budget doesn't mean exactly £15 leaves your account every single day — some days may bill more, some less, and OpenAI is managing toward the weekly average rather than a daily line. That's a useful thing to know before you look at day-by-day spend and assume something's wrong.
Why the platform minimum isn't Shays Media's test budget
£15 a day is £105 a week — enough to keep a campaign technically live. Meeting the platform minimum does not mean Shays Media considers the budget commercially sufficient for a managed test. For managed clients, our current commercial recommendation normally starts at £750 per month.
It's important to be clear about what kind of figure that is: it's a Shays Media commercial recommendation, not an OpenAI requirement. OpenAI doesn't ask for £750 a month. That figure is our commercial testing standard: we want enough budget available to give a controlled test a reasonable opportunity to produce decision-useful evidence.
For managed clients, our current recommendation is:
- Recommended minimum media budget: £750/month
- Preferred initial testing range: £750–£1,500/month
- Lower budgets may be considered case by case, but with the caveat that the evidence they produce will be thinner.
None of that is an OpenAI rule. It's a judgement call based on what it takes to test a new channel properly, and it's one you're free to disagree with.
Shays Media's fees, separate from media spend
Media spend is paid directly by you to OpenAI — it never passes through Shays Media. Our fees are separate, and cover the work of setting up and, if you choose ongoing management, running the account.
Setup Only — £495 one-off, covering one campaign, one ad group, one finished ad, the suitability and policy check, advertiser-account setup guidance, offer/landing-page review, customer-intent definition, context-hint creation, campaign structure, ad copy, the destination/congruence check, a tracking check, the launch gate, launch itself, a short post-launch technical check, and handover.
Setup + Management — £495 setup + £595/month, covering standard active management capacity of up to three active ad groups and up to two active ads per ad group, plus performance monitoring, diagnosis, controlled optimisation, change logging, a weekly review process, monthly reporting, Scale/Continue Controlled Testing/Hold-Fix/Stop recommendations, relevant policy rechecks, and client updates and decision logging.
Additional capacity is £125/month per additional active ad group, where agreed. Additional campaigns or unusually complex work are scoped separately.
A worked example (arithmetic, not a forecast)
To make the total picture concrete, here's how the costs actually fall over time for a standard managed-client engagement at our current pricing and our recommended entry-level media budget. This is arithmetic — what the numbers add up to and when — not a prediction of what you'll get back. The setup fee, management fee and media spend don't all land on the same day, so a single "first month" total can be misleading about timing even when the underlying figures are right.
A representative timeline:
| Date | Item | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Day 1 (e.g. 10 September) | Setup fee, paid before setup work begins | £495 |
| Management Start Date, agreed with you (e.g. 17 September) | Management fee begins | £595 |
| From launch onward | Media spend, paid directly to OpenAI as delivered | £750/month (our recommended starting point) |
The management fee then recurs monthly from the Management Start Date — that date becomes your management billing anniversary going forward, not the setup date. Media spend is billed separately by OpenAI, direct to you, as it's actually delivered.
Added together, a standard managed engagement at our recommended £750/month media budget totals £495 (one-off) + £595/month (management) + £750/month (media) — £1,840 across the setup-and-launch period, and £1,345 in a typical ongoing month once setup is behind you. That's before any applicable taxes or other separately agreed costs; we're keeping tax treatment unstated here rather than guessing at a VAT position.
If you chose Setup Only and managed the account yourself afterwards, your only ongoing cost would be your media spend to OpenAI — there's no Shays Media management fee in that model, though also no ongoing diagnosis, optimisation or reporting from us.
These figures scale with your chosen media budget. What they don't tell you is what return you'd get — that depends on your offer, your landing page, your conversion rate and the evidence a real campaign produces, none of which can be forecast honestly in advance.
What this doesn't include
This article covers platform minimum, media budget and Shays Media's fees. It deliberately doesn't include a promised cost-per-click, cost-per-acquisition or return figure, because a reliable account-specific figure cannot be known before a campaign has produced its own evidence. A guaranteed CPA quoted in advance should be treated as a claim requiring exceptional evidence, not as a forecast you can safely rely on.
Where this fits into a decision
Budget is one part of a suitability decision, not the whole of it. Before committing spend, it's worth working through whether your offer, landing page and measurement setup are actually ready — covered in more depth in Is Your Business a Good Fit for ChatGPT Ads?.
Check Your Fit — the Fit Check looks at your budget alongside eligibility, offer economics and measurement readiness. Prefer to talk it through first? Contact us via the Contact page.
A few questions people ask at this stage
What is the minimum ChatGPT Ads budget? OpenAI's platform minimum is currently £15/day for GBP accounts — that's a floor, not a workable test budget. Shays Media recommends £750/month as a starting point for managed clients, which is our own commercial judgement, not an OpenAI requirement.
Why does Shays Media recommend more than the platform minimum? Because the platform minimum is a technical floor, not evidence that a particular budget will produce enough data for a useful commercial decision. Shays Media uses £750/month as its usual managed-test recommendation to give a controlled test more room to generate decision-useful evidence. That remains a Shays Media judgement, not an OpenAI requirement.
Who pays the advertising spend? You do, directly to OpenAI, through your own advertiser account and billing profile. Shays Media's fees are separate and never include your media budget.