By the end of 2022, the global Artificial Intelligence market was worth $136.5 billion. Since then, market value, investments, and anything money-related around AI have grown.

With those amounts of cash spent on AI, you might wonder how to take part in those hefty profits and bring home some of those dollar bills. Many in the developer community have had the same thought. Among the new possibilities that opened up with the ChatGPT boom, making it work and make money for us has crossed the minds of many. As a result, AI-generated services and products, related to ChatGPT tools and applications, have flooded the internet.

If you're thinking the worst, then stay calm: You’re not late into this gold rush. Keep reading to learn how people are making money with ChatGPT and how you can earn some cash yourself. 

How are people using ChatGPT to make money? APIs certainly help

At its core, ChatGPT is designed to generate human-like responses to questions and requests, making it a handy tool for customer service, marketing, and other business applications. Many organisations rely on ChatGPT and other similar AIs for health management, payment processing, deep learning, customer management, content creation, productivity, data analytics, and more. Surveys demonstrate that 97% of business owners believe ChatGPT will help their business, and 67% of consumers prefer using AI language model tools rather than traditional search engines to find information or answers. 

But this is one side of the coin, only. These companies mostly develop their own AI dataset or leverage an existing AI on their own business. What you could do, instead, is leverage an AI to create a business. It’s a product built upon an existing product. And one of the critical tools to get these products-built-upon-products running is the ChatGPT API.

About the ChatGPT API

ChatGPT and Whisper models are now available on the OpenAI API, giving developers access to the AI’s capabilities without creating an AI from scratch. (If you’re new to programming, consider an API to be a resource that allows you to integrate functions from a program without needing to understand how the program works at all. For your reference, ChatGPT most probably is a frontend chat website that interacts with an API that connects it to GPT-4, the engine providing natural language processing. So, hypothetically, you could build your own ChatGPT by integrating the API to a chat that works on a browser without knowing how the LLM running behind works).

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ChatGPT is just a year old, but it’s already multimodal — remember when it just wrote down stuff? Looks like the old days — and provides various features such as Multi-Turn Chats; Contextual Understanding; System and User Messages; Customizability Choices, and Multi-Language Support.

So, to say the least, you can use the ChatGPT API to create:

• Text-generation apps
• Image-generation apps
• Chatbots (Chevrolet knows about this one)
• Translation apps
• Content recommendation apps
• And even educational tools.

Now, you might be thinking: “Why develop any of this, if all of them exist already and the competition’s too strong?” You have a point. Most of these solutions are already widespread. You can head to ChatGPT’s landing page for a text generation app. You can also head to the same website if you want to translate just about anything. What we’ll focus on, instead, are more novel ideas that are working, and earning money, but are not as obvious. We’ll get into that soon.

Are there any costs behind apps running on the ChatGPT API?

Yes. There are costs behind running a project that earns you money by using ChatGPT. OpenAI has a transparent pricing model. What you should consider is how to adapt your business model to it. So if you’re offering a free trial, for example, of an image-generating web app, you should limit the number of requests, because, if not, you’ll be met with an eye-popping invoice from the pals from California.

Working ideas that are making money with APIs

When thinking about apps and websites powered by ChatGPT API or AI technology, we often come up with the same ideas we are used to seeing every day. Some of them, such as content writing services, plugins and extensions, social media management, blog posts, affiliate marketing, custom AI chatbots, and website creation, have been done and redone in every way, shape, or form. Some are already dead. Remember AI checkers that used ChatGPT to detect ChatGPT? They’ve been defunct for a while now, and ChatGPT is merely a year old.

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Instead of expanding upon sinking cash grabs, we will present you with some examples of more original ideas and applications for ChatGPT API and AI technology that might spark a creative fire in you and help you develop the best possible product. These are some successful companies running on APIs:

Language learning

Speak is an AI-powered language learning app. They’re the fastest-growing English app in South Korea, and are already using the Whisper API to power a new AI-speaking companion product. Since ChatGPT is multimodal, maybe you can start your own company and simply integrate ChatGPT, not even Whisper. The cons: They snatched an excellent domain, so competition will be fierce.

Human image generation and face-swapping

AI Human Generator is a clever tool that utilizes image creation API and AI technology, allowing you to generate photorealistic pictures of humans based on your specifications. Photo AI, a similar product, is allegedly putting together a Monthly Recurring Revenue of $80.000 and allows you to modify every aspect of a photo you upload to it. According to their founders, none of these companies uses the DALL·E API, but we couldn’t prove it for sure. In any case, you can start your own company and effectively use ChatGPT’s API.

Interior design

Interior AI, from Photo AI's creator (who also runs a dating app profile review tool), wants you to fire your interior designer. It sounds too harsh, but maybe you want to renovate the interior at home, and this tool will help. Interior AI you can create AI renders of your room and see how it would end up looking with different settings, furniture, colours, and styles. It currently stands at a Monthly Recurring Revenue of $42.000. Now, the stack powering their image creation brawn is unclear. Some online users claim that Interior AI is using open-source, off-the-shelf AI. Some others claim that they’re using OpenAI’s API. In any case, you know you can do this with ChatGPT, and it’s already bringing in revenue to an industry colleague.

Ideas to develop and make money with ChatGPT

AI and spending on AI are not stopping soon. The market is expected to grow 120% year over year for the next few years, and by 2030, the global AI market is expected to be worth $1.81 trillion. So, maybe it could be time to participate in this craze. And so much research about APIs and image generation AI left us with a few different ideas for applications and websites that might benefit from ChatGPT API tools. These are some of them:

Phone wallpapers out of APIs

Banking on the current internet craze for anime and manga series. Any wallpaper app for your cellphone might benefit from ChatGPT API and DALL·E 3 AI technology to generate images from already existing images that you can upload from your favourite manga panels to new pictures you think would have a product-market fit.

Prompt translator and bypasser

Building upon the previous example, in which, perhaps, OpenAI’s API is a bit restrictive when you request it to create images on trademarked content, you can check our guide on how to bypass ChatGPT’s (and thus OpenAI’s) filter and create a paid app that customises the user’s prompts so that it can evade blockers. So this tool could be a simple UI in which a user pastes their original prompt, and upon clicking on “Re-do to Bypass,” it gets sent via OpenAI’s API to your instance, where you have already mastered the prompt to create bypassing prompts. The app then gives back a prompt in “bypassing language.” Is this recursion? If it is, then it’d mean endless money.

Tattoo with AI

Have you ever browsed through Pinterest for hours on end, looking for the perfect tattoo, and saw the same design done on everybody on the internet? How about an AI-assisted web app that, with the help of ChatGPT API and image generation technology, can design new tattoos based on existing designs or text prompts and then allow you to preview how it would look on your body? If you can add AR, then you’ll have a tattoo designer and previewer on the spot.

Can you use ChatGPT to make money?

Yes, you can use ChatGPT to make money. The ChatGPT API website and AI technology as a whole constitute a remarkable set of tools to build your online business from scratch and give your ideas some gas. The tech does have some limits, though, which go primarily undocumented because it’s simply too new. So if you’re thinking of founding a business to earn money from it, don’t think of an idea and after, try to make ChatGPT to pull your weight. Do it the other way around: Analyse how far you can get, how stripped down your request pool can be, and attempt at it.

We sincerely encourage you to try them because as daunting as it may seem to learn something new, we promise you will do it with other developers. There are thousands of guides, tutorials, and forums where people with all kinds of experience and knowledge are willing to lend a helpful hand.

So, do or do not, there is no try. Get your keyboard ready and start working on your ideas because that's the first step to making money with ChatGPT. If you kickstart a technically impressive project that doesn’t leave you millions, then at least you’ll have an attractive entry on your resume. Make sure to visit our job boards and check how, at WeAreDevelopers, we’re pairing the best developers in Europe with the best companies.