Why there is no rate card
Ask OpenAI for a price list and you will not get one. ChatGPT ads are sold by auction and, in the early phase, through managed buys with a limited set of advertisers. That means the price is set by who else wants the same conversation topic in the same geography at the same time. A topic like 'apartments for rent in Riyadh' will not cost what 'wholesale packaging supplier in Dammam' costs, and neither number is printed anywhere.
Anyone quoting you a fixed Saudi CPM or cost per lead for ChatGPT today is guessing. We do not. What we can do is set a test budget, run it against a measured funnel, and give you the real number in SAR after the first weeks. That is how we price Google and Meta too; the platform is new, the method is not.
Budget thinking in SAR for the largest GCC market
Saudi Arabia is the biggest market in the GCC, which cuts two ways. More people asking ChatGPT about your category means more placements to buy, and more competitors bidding for them. A Riyadh e-commerce brand that already spends on Snapchat, TikTok, Meta and Google should think of ChatGPT as one more line in that mix, funded by shifting a slice from the channel with the weakest tracked return, not by finding new money.
A practical rule: size the first month at roughly what you already spend on one serious campaign on Snapchat or Google. That is enough to buy real data across two or three topics and a couple of cities without betting the quarter. If the tracked revenue beats your weakest channel, the budget grows from there. If it does not, you have learned something for the price of one campaign and moved on.
VAT and invoicing for Saudi advertisers
Saudi VAT is 15%, and it lands on advertising like anything else. How it appears on a ChatGPT ads invoice, whether charged locally or handled under the reverse-charge mechanism for a foreign supplier, is something we confirm with your accountant before launch ‹CONFIRM›. Budget the gross figure with VAT on top so the number in your plan is the number that leaves the bank.
When Aahfil manages the buy from Kuwait, the media invoice and our management fee are separate lines, both traceable to a tracked result in the report. Get your commercial registration and VAT registration ready early; they are needed for advertiser verification and for clean invoices, and they are the documents that slow launches down when they are missing. Sort them in week one and nothing else waits on paperwork.
What drives the cost up or down
Topic competition is the biggest lever. Real estate, e-commerce electronics and travel bookings are crowded in Saudi conversations; niche B2B topics are quieter and cheaper. Geography is the second: Riyadh alone costs more per placement than Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam together spread the bid. Language is the third. Arabic-first campaigns match the way most Saudis actually ask, so they tend to reach more of the conversation for the same money; English variants matter for Riyadh professionals and expats.
Then there is what happens after the click, which decides whether any price is cheap. A landing page that loads slowly on mobile, a checkout without Mada or Apple Pay, or a WhatsApp number that answers the next morning will make a cheap placement expensive. That is why measurement and conversion-rate optimisation sit inside the ChatGPT ads plan rather than next to it. We fix the funnel before we buy the traffic.
How to get a real number for your business
Send us your website, what you sell, which cities you serve, and roughly what you spend on ads today. We check the current ChatGPT ads status for Saudi Arabia first, because rollout is staged by country and by plan and no budget matters until access is confirmed. If you can buy, we come back with a first-month plan: topics, cities, languages, measurement, and a SAR budget with VAT shown. If you cannot yet, we tell you what to prepare so the first month is not wasted on setup.
One honest caveat. Because early access has run through managed buys, minimum commitments may exist that a small business cannot meet, and they change as self-serve widens. We would rather tell you that on WhatsApp than sell you a plan you cannot fund. For the availability side read are ChatGPT ads available in Saudi Arabia yet; for how the money compares with other channels read ChatGPT ads vs Google, Meta, Snapchat and TikTok.