OpenAI opens an enterprise marketplace with 32 partners, and there's no checkout button yet

OpenAI opened an enterprise marketplace at its DevDay conference on Sept. 29 that lets companies apply part of their existing OpenAI spending commitments toward software from 32 approved partners, including Adobe, Figma, Salesforce, HubSpot, ServiceNow, CrowdStrike and Harvey. It landed alongside a separate, broader push to make ChatGPT itself a place where people discover, connect to and run other companies' apps, according to TechCrunch's account of the event.

What changed

The two moves are distinct but reinforce each other. OpenAI Marketplace is not a self-service storefront, even though it looks like one. As Channel Insider reports, a customer cannot pick a product, check out on OpenAI's site and get a single bill. Instead, OpenAI and the partner first confirm whether a purchase qualifies, the enterprise contracts directly with the partner, the partner sends its own invoice, and OpenAI credits the eligible amount against the customer's existing commitment. The initial 32 partners span creative software (Adobe, Figma), customer experience and workflow tools (Salesforce, ServiceNow, HubSpot, Sierra, Decagon, Zendesk), security (CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks), legal AI (Harvey, Legora) and a longer tail that includes Datadog, Glean, Notion, Ramp, Replit, Runway, Vercel, Baseten, CodeRabbit and ElevenLabs. More vendors can apply through a waitlist, subject to OpenAI's approval.

On the consumer side, OpenAI expanded the Apps SDK it has been building inside ChatGPT: the chatbot now surfaces app suggestions inside a conversation when it judges one could help, a new extensions architecture lets developers build interactive panels users work inside without leaving the chat, and "Sign in with ChatGPT" lets people carry their identity and existing AI usage allowance into 16 launch-partner apps, among them Cognition's Devin, Notion and Vercel. OpenAI also introduced Dots, agents that can do "proactive research" in the background, read-only, across what the company describes as an ecosystem of more than 4,000 connected apps, and said ChatGPT now has 1.2 billion weekly users.

OpenAI's own demo made the distribution pitch concrete. In one walkthrough, a meeting-notes app ran inside a ChatGPT conversation, pulling in a user's calendar, taking notes during the call, then summarizing follow-up items once it ended. In another, people worked on design revisions through apps from Figma and Adobe without leaving the chat window. Finished work can be turned into a lightweight ChatGPT-hosted site that colleagues open and sign into with their own credentials, which is a second way the identity layer feeds back into distribution: the app doesn't just run inside ChatGPT, the sharing happens there too.

Notably absent from either announcement: any billing or revenue-share system comparable to what Apple and Google run on their app stores. TechCrunch's reporting is explicit that OpenAI did not announce one, and it says the company also improved its developer review process, letting submissions be tracked, revised and resubmitted without restarting from scratch.

Who this affects

Enterprise and B2B software vendors are the clearest target of the Marketplace piece, and the roster already includes direct rivals for the same marketing and sales budget — Salesforce and HubSpot both made the initial list, alongside customer-support AI players Sierra, Decagon and Zendesk competing in the same bucket. For those companies, Marketplace membership functions less like a paid channel and more like a procurement shortcut: it gives a vendor another route into accounts where AI spending is already approved, without OpenAI collecting a fee or defining referral terms yet.

The consumer-facing changes matter to a different, larger group: any SaaS company whose product could plausibly run as a connected app or agent target inside a chat interface. Being suggested mid-conversation, or letting a user "sign in with ChatGPT" instead of creating another account, is a distribution and onboarding-friction story, not a revenue one, at least for now.

What to do differently

• If you sell to enterprise: check whether your buyers already hold OpenAI commitments, and apply for the Marketplace waitlist if a credible case exists.
• Separate "OpenAI Marketplace partner" as a trust signal in sales and PR from any claim of a new revenue channel — neither OpenAI nor the partners have published one.
• If you're evaluating the Apps SDK, budget for discovery and support, not for a cut of anything; OpenAI hasn't said how or whether it will take one either.
• Watch for a billing or revenue-share announcement before building a go-to-market plan that assumes one exists.

OpenAI is building the discovery and identity layer of an app store before it has said anything about the economics of one.

That sequencing is the real signal for marketers. Distribution access is arriving before the rules for monetizing it, which means the vendors moving fastest — applying for Marketplace status, testing Apps SDK integrations — are doing so on the assumption that early presence will matter once OpenAI does define the business terms. It's a reasonable bet, given a chat interface OpenAI says draws 1.2 billion weekly users, but it is still a bet: nothing announced this week obligates OpenAI to share revenue, guarantee placement or keep any given partner's terms once the program matures.