ChatGPT Go’s Free Year Is Running Out. You Gave Them a Card to Get It.
On 4 November 2025, India got something unusual: a year of ChatGPT Go, free, for anyone in the country who wanted it. Millions took it. The redemption window closed on 21 January 2026.
Count twelve months forward from the day you claimed it. For the earliest claimants, that lands on 4 November 2026 — about three weeks from now.
Here is the part most people have forgotten: to claim free ChatGPT Go, you had to hand over a payment method. A card, or a UPI mandate. It is still sitting there.
Table of Contents
What India was actually given
Three big AI offers landed in India within three months of each other, and they do not end the same way. That difference is the whole story.
| Offer | Length | Stated value | Payment method needed? | Claim window |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT Go (OpenAI) | 12 months | ₹399/month | Yes — card or UPI | 4 Nov 2025 – 21 Jan 2026 |
| Perplexity Pro (via Airtel) | 12 months | ₹17,000 | Yes — credit card | Ended 16 Jan 2026 |
| Google AI Pro (via Jio) | 18 months | ₹35,100 | No — tied to your Jio plan | Reported as 30 Oct 2025 – 29 Oct 2026 |
Two of the three took your card details. One did not. ChatGPT Go and Perplexity Pro are the two worth checking this month, and the OpenAI wave arrives first.
What happens to ChatGPT Go on day 366
We went looking for OpenAI’s own published statement on what happens when your free twelve months of ChatGPT Go run out. We could not find one.
What we found instead is consistent secondary reporting that the subscription auto-renews, and that you are then charged the regular monthly fee — ₹399 in India, which checks as current as of 10 October 2026. That is the sensible reading. A subscription that “auto-renews monthly at no charge for twelve months” is still a subscription that auto-renews.
But we are not going to tell you it is a confirmed fact when we could not confirm it. What we can tell you is that you attached a payment method to an account, the promotional period has a defined length, and nobody from OpenAI has publicly said the charge will not come.
Treat that as reason enough to check.
Ignore the 16 December date going around
There is a date circulating in Indian AI groups and on several sites: 16 December 2026, presented as the day the free ChatGPT Go year ends for everyone. We could not trace it to anything OpenAI has published, and we looked.
It is also structurally wrong. The offer did not run on a single shared clock. Your twelve months started the day you redeemed, which is why the expiry wave runs from early November 2026 through to late January 2027 rather than landing on one date.
If you claimed it in the first week, you are near the front of that wave.
Why a ₹399 charge needs no OTP
This is where India’s own payment rules matter, and where most people assume a protection that does not exist.
Under the RBI’s e-mandate framework, recurring debits up to ₹15,000 per transaction do not require an additional factor of authentication. No OTP. No approval prompt. A ₹399 charge is nowhere near that ceiling, so it will simply go through.
What you do get is a pre-debit notification at least 24 hours before the money moves. It is required to carry the merchant name, the amount, the date and time, the mandate reference number and the purpose of the debit.
That notification is the entire protection. One alert, twenty-four hours, on a phone that gets a hundred other notifications a day. The RBI also requires that revoking a mandate is free and available at any time — but you have to actually do it.
Find your real ChatGPT Go renewal date
Do not work from any date you read online, including ours. Your account knows.
- In ChatGPT: Settings → Subscription. The renewal or expiry date shown there is the one that matters.
- If you subscribed through the App Store: iPhone Settings → your name → Subscriptions.
- If you went through Google Play: Play Store → profile → Payments and subscriptions.
- If you paid by UPI: the mandate lives in your UPI app, not in ChatGPT. Check there too.
There was one more detail at signup worth remembering: UPI users were shown a temporary ₹1 charge per billing cycle, refunded each time. That is a live mandate doing a handshake. If you saw a rupee come and go every month, your mandate is working perfectly.
Cancelling ChatGPT Go properly takes two steps
This is the bit that catches people, and it is not specific to ChatGPT Go — it applies to any Indian subscription paid by UPI AutoPay.
Step one: cancel inside the service. Turn off renewal in your ChatGPT Go subscription settings.
Step two: revoke the UPI mandate separately. Cancelling in an app does not always kill the mandate sitting in your UPI app, and a live mandate is a standing permission to debit you.
In Google Pay, the documented route is to tap the pre-debit notification you receive 24 hours before a charge, which lets you pause or cancel, confirmed with your UPI PIN. Revoking ends the merchant’s ability to debit that mandate at all. PhonePe, Paytm and most bank apps keep an equivalent list under a “Mandates” or “AutoPay” section.
One warning on timing. For ChatGPT Go, cancelling during the free period reportedly removes your access immediately rather than at the end of the term, and the same account cannot re-enrol. So this is not a “cancel it now and forget it” situation — it is a “know your date and act near it” situation.
The Jio offer works differently, and closes this month
Google’s offer through Reliance Jio is the outlier, in the user’s favour. There is no card. Eligibility is tied to holding an active unlimited 5G plan of ₹349 or more, you must be 18 or over, and it is one claim per mobile number.
At the end of the eighteen months, reporting indicates access reverts to the free Gemini tier rather than converting into a paid plan. Nothing to cancel, because nothing was ever authorised to charge you.
The catch is different: you have to keep that ₹349-plus plan active for the whole period, and the claim window is reported to close on 29 October 2026. If you are on Jio and have not claimed it, that is eighteen days.
We have written before about AI agents that shop on your behalf and about the AI content rules already in force in India. On the payments side, our pieces on UPI discounts during festive sales and what “10% instant discount” actually pays you cover the same habit this one does: reading the terms rather than the banner.
The Honest Fine Print
We could not confirm the renewal behaviour with OpenAI. The claim that ChatGPT Go auto-charges ₹399 at the end of the free year comes from secondary coverage and from the ordinary logic of subscriptions, not from an OpenAI page we could read. If you need certainty, your own Settings screen beats every article including this one.
The 21 January 2026 close date is secondhand. It is attributed to OpenAI’s release notes by sites quoting them, but we did not read the release notes ourselves.
Jio’s own offer page does not display an end date. The 29 October 2026 deadline comes from reporting that cites Jio’s terms. Jio’s public page calls it a “limited-time offer” and leaves it there. If you are relying on that date, claim early rather than on the day.
Storage figures disagree. Coverage at launch in October 2025 described the Jio bundle as including 2TB of cloud storage. Jio’s current page says 5TB. Google may have upgraded the tier in between; we could not establish when.
We did not verify the Perplexity renewal behaviour. Perplexity’s own help centre confirms the Airtel promotion, the ₹17,000 value, the credit card requirement and the 16 January 2026 close — but it does not say what happens at the end of the twelve months. That gap is in their documentation, not our reading of it.
Prices move. ₹399 is the current India figure for ChatGPT Go and appears to be GST-inclusive, but we would not stake anything on the tax treatment at checkout.
We have no insight into how many people will actually be charged. Plenty of users will have cancelled already, switched plans, or never completed the mandate. We are describing a mechanism, not predicting a number.
Bottom Line
India was given a genuinely large amount of free AI, and the offers were real. But two of the three required a payment instrument to activate, and payment instruments do not expire quietly — they renew.
The useful action takes two minutes. Open ChatGPT, go to Settings, read your ChatGPT Go date. Open your UPI app, find the mandates list, see what is still live in there. If you are on Jio and never claimed the Gemini offer, do that before the end of the month.
The free year was not a trick. But a free year that ends on a date you never noted, charged to a card you forgot you gave, is how a lot of people end up paying for things they stopped using in March.
FAQ
When does the free ChatGPT Go year end in India?
Twelve months from your own redemption date, not a single shared date. Redemptions ran from 4 November 2025 to 21 January 2026, so expiries run from early November 2026 to late January 2027. Settings → Subscription in ChatGPT shows your actual date.
Will ChatGPT Go charge me automatically when it ends?
Secondary reporting says the ChatGPT Go subscription auto-renews at the standard ₹399 per month unless you cancel. We could not find OpenAI’s own published confirmation of this, so treat it as likely rather than certain — and check your own account.
How much does ChatGPT Go cost in India?
₹399 per month as of October 2026, which appears to include GST. It launched at that price in India in August 2025 and offers roughly ten times the free tier’s limits on messages, image generation and file uploads.
Why is there no OTP for the renewal charge?
Under the RBI’s e-mandate framework, recurring debits up to ₹15,000 per transaction do not need additional authentication. You instead get a mandatory notification at least 24 hours before the debit, listing the merchant, amount, date and mandate reference.
How do I cancel a UPI AutoPay mandate?
Cancel in the service first, then revoke the mandate in your UPI app — the two are separate. In Google Pay you can tap the pre-debit notification to pause or cancel, confirmed with your UPI PIN. Other apps keep mandates under an AutoPay or Mandates section. The RBI requires this facility to be free and available at any time.
Is the 16 December 2026 end date real?
We could not trace it to anything OpenAI published, and it conflicts with how the offer worked, since each user’s twelve months started at their own redemption. Use your account’s date rather than any circulating one.
What happens when the Jio Gemini offer ends?
Reporting indicates access reverts to the free Gemini tier rather than converting to a paid subscription, because no payment method was attached. You do need to keep an active ₹349-plus unlimited 5G plan for the full eighteen months to retain it.
Can I still claim any of these offers?
The OpenAI and Perplexity promotions closed in January 2026. The Jio and Google offer is reported to stay open until 29 October 2026 for eligible Jio users.
Sources: ChatGPT Go’s India launch and pricing via TechCrunch; the free-year announcement via TechCrunch and claim mechanics via Business Today; the Airtel promotion terms from Perplexity’s help centre; the Jio offer from Jio; RBI e-mandate rules via legal analysis at Economic Laws Practice; mandate management steps from Google Pay Help.
