They will open up to be undercut by players like Gemini that can provide a less-shitty free tier, and capture their market share.
I seriously doubt, at this moment, that OpenAI can come up with a offering good enough to entice people to pay for them when there will be other free to use services around. Google seems to be well positioned to eat their lunch.
Google does indeed. But that ignores that Microsoft is playing the same game.
For example in the UK's NHS, the worlds sixth largest employer is now fully committed to Microsoft 365.
That's a lot of Copilot money if Microsoft sees it that way.
And OpenAI is funded via Microsoft, I also have a Microsoft 2TB subscription. And so do many people have both work based and personal home subscriptions.
It's a complete mess of a situation. If Microsoft moves away from GPT (it can since it's advertised under the copilot brand) OpenAI is dead in the water of course.
It's certainly almost everyone today, but that's because enshitificarion has yet to start properly.
The risk to OpenAI is that their free tier are captured by the tack on markets (i.e. Gemini with 2TB of cloud storage).
But otherwise they will make free more annoying until people just buy the cheap tier and then move up from there. Like chatgpt Go.