ChatGPT Ads Opens in Southeast Asia and Taiwan — With Daily Minimums a Fraction of the $25 USD Floor

On 2026-09-23 OpenAI published ChatGPT Ads expands to Southeast Asia and Taiwan. It said that "starting today, ChatGPT Ads will begin rolling out across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Taiwan." Over the next day the help centre caught up. The self-service country table grew from 56 to 63. The minimum-budget table gained seven local currencies. The billing article also changed how long a card authorization hold can last.

The headline is the expansion. The detail that matters most for planning is the budget floors. Converted at mid-market rates from 2026-09-24, every new minimum is between roughly 3% and 13% of the 25 USD floor in the same table, and four of the seven are under one US dollar. We'll get to what that does and does not mean.

Unlike the Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and UAE opening, which only showed up in the help centre, this one had an announcement. No OpenAI advertiser product-update email arrived during the change window, so this article cites none.

Last verified: 2026-09-25. Sections marked "What OpenAI documents" quote help.openai.com, developers.openai.com and openai.com as captured by Soku's daily documentation monitor, with links at the point of use. Sections marked "Soku analysis" are our own reading. Where the documentation says nothing, we say so and don't fill the gap.

What changed

1. Availability: seven markets added, 56 → 63

In Ads Manager Availability, our capture at 00:53 UTC on 2026-09-24 listed 56 countries. By 00:01 UTC on 2026-09-25 it listed 63, with the article marked "Updated: 18 hours ago". The seven new rows, in alphabetical order:

None of the seven went through Coming Soon first. They appeared already marked Available, just as the Middle East markets did in the 52-country expansion. The announcement's claim of "over 60 countries" matches the new count of 63.

The eligibility note above the table didn't change, and it is the rule that matters for regional structures:

Note: To use self-service Ads Manager, the legal entity that will advertise and be billed must be based in a country listed as available below.

The access-type table above it didn't change either. It still says "Advertisers in the new European markets can currently get started through the OpenAI Ads Solutions team, agency partners, or technology partners". That wording doesn't mention the new APAC markets.

2. Minimum Campaign Spend: 23 → 30 currencies

The table at the bottom of Create Campaigns for ChatGPT Ads has the column headers Billing currency and Minimum daily budget. So these are minimum daily budgets, keyed to the ad account's billing currency. They aren't bid floors and they aren't per-country targeting minimums. The article says so in the budget section: "The current minimum daily budget varies by your ad account's billing currency." The article showed "Updated: 56 minutes ago" at our capture, and seven rows had been added:

No existing row changed. USD is still 25 USD, EUR and GBP are still 15, and JPY is still 2,500. One formatting detail: six of the new rows show two decimal places ("4.00 SGD", "14,000.00 IDR"), while VND and every older row don't. We note this as published and don't read anything into it.

3. Billing: the card hold can now last longer than 8 days

Billing & Payment changed one sentence, which appears twice (in the setup section and in the FAQ):

• Previous (2026-09-24): "This is not a completed charge and is automatically released after verification, though it may remain visible for up to 8 days depending on your bank."
• Current (2026-09-25): "This is not a completed charge and is automatically released after verification, though it may remain visible for 8 days or longer depending on your bank."

The first half of the sentence is the same in both versions: the hold "may appear as the equivalent amount in your card's currency." For an advertiser in one of the new markets, that hold is converted by the card issuer and sits on the card for an open-ended period.

What OpenAI documents about selling into the new markets

Who can buy, and through whom

The announcement names three access routes: the OpenAI Ads Solutions team, "agency partners including dentsu, Havas Media, Omnicom Media, Publicis Groupe and WPP", and technology partners. It adds that "self-service access through Ads Manager is also available for eligible businesses." It frames the launch as following earlier Asia Pacific launches in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and India. It restates that ads are shown only to Free and Go plan users.

Home country first

The same Create Campaigns article has a restriction that applies to every new self-serve account in the seven markets:

Some new self-serve ad accounts can initially advertise only in their home country—the country associated with the ad account. Selecting other countries does not override this restriction.

Your account automatically becomes eligible to advertise in other supported countries once identity verification is approved and you reach the required advertising spend from running campaigns in your home country.

OpenAI doesn't publish the spend threshold.

Account settings are fixed at creation

Ads Manager Beta Account Setup says: "The country or region, billing currency, and time zone selected when an advertiser account is created cannot be changed later." The Billing & Payment article is softer: these details "may not be self-serve editable after account creation," and it tells advertisers to contact support if the wrong details were entered. Either way, you choose the currency once, and that choice decides which minimum-spend row applies.

Cards should match the country

Billing & Payment says: "Your billing information and payment method should match the business entity and country or region used when your Ads Manager account was created... A card or payment method associated with a different country may not be accepted." If you need to bill under a different country or legal entity, "you may need to create a separate advertiser account."

Tax IDs

Billing & Payment says advertisers can add supported VAT and tax IDs in Ads Manager and that "available tax ID types depend on your billing country." The only country-specific tax FAQ on the page covers Japanese Consumption Tax. None of the seven new markets has one.

Policy restrictions that apply everywhere outside the US

The Advertising Policies page is still at v1.6 (September 2026) and didn't change with this expansion. Three of its lines limit who can advertise in the new markets:

• "Ads for financial services outside the US are generally prohibited."
• "Ads for health services outside the US are generally prohibited."
• "Ads for legal services outside of the US are currently prohibited."

The policy also requires "geographic compliance": advertisers "may not misrepresent their business location, service area, or eligibility to advertise in particular markets."

Ad language

Ads in ChatGPT says: "An ad's language may differ from your conversation or interface language. Ad language selection can consider location, language settings, and conversation language." That is the only statement about ad language that we can find.

What the developer docs say (and don't)

We checked every developers.openai.com Ads page in the same capture, including Targeting, the Campaigns API reference and the Ad Account reference. None of them changed between 2026-09-24 and 2026-09-25. None of them names any of the seven countries or any of the seven currencies.

The developer docs don't list countries or currencies for any market. Instead they defer:

• On countries, the Targeting page says: "Country codes use ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 format, such as US. A code's ISO validity does not mean it is available for advertising in your account; use supported advertising locations." It points to a geographic target catalog at ads.openai.com. We couldn't fetch that catalog (it returned a Cloudflare challenge), so we can't confirm whether it includes the new markets.
• On currencies, the Ad Account response returns a currency_code. The Campaigns reference says "time and currency fields will respect your account-set timezone and currency defaults." The spending-limits section says to "use the currency's smallest unit, such as multiples of 10000 micros for USD."
• The only budget floor in the developer docs is in the Bulk API page: campaign.create "defaults to an impression-billed, lifetime, paused campaign. Its budget must be at least 1000000 currency micros". That is one unit of the account currency. The page doesn't refer to the per-currency daily minimum table.

The two surfaces don't contradict each other, but they don't match either. The help centre lists the seven countries and publishes a minimum daily budget for each new currency. The developer docs list neither and send you to account-level fields and a separate catalog. If you build on the API, the help-centre table is currently the only published source for the new minimums.

Soku analysis: what the new minimums mean in practice

Conversions are Soku's approximate illustration using mid-market rates published by open.er-api.com at 00:02 UTC on 2026-09-24. OpenAI publishes the minimums in local currency only.

Before this edit, the lowest minimum in USD terms was INR 725, about $7.57. The seven new rows are all below that, and six of the seven sit between roughly $0.73 and $1.89.

We can't tell from the documentation whether OpenAI set these floors low on purpose for newer, lower-CPM markets or whether the rows will be revised. We haven't seen OpenAI explain any of its minimums. The table has changed before without notice: when the UAE opened, the AED row was quietly cut from 70 to 65. For the history of how this table has moved, see our minimum budgets by country tracker.

Three practical points follow.

1. The published minimum probably won't be your real floor. OpenAI's Daily Budgets article adds a second limit. For daily-budget campaigns with fixed bidding, "the daily budget must also be at least the highest effective per-event bid across applicable non-archived ad groups, including relevant audience bid adjustments." A CPM bid or CPC bid set in SGD can easily be higher than 4 SGD, and then the bid sets the floor. We covered that mechanic in why your highest ad group bid is your daily budget floor.

2. A campaign sized to the minimum won't produce a readable test. At under $1 a day, a campaign can technically run but gives you almost no data to judge. Daily budgets are also averages: OpenAI says spend on one day can reach twice the daily budget and up to seven times it across the Sunday–Saturday week. Size tests to the clicks or conversions you need to decide, not to the table's minimum. Reporting lag makes low-volume reads worse. Spend shows up about 7–8 hours late and conversions 24–48 hours late, as documented in our reporting-delay breakdown.

3. Choose the account currency deliberately. Currency is fixed at creation and the card should match the entity's country. For a regional group, the Singapore entity's account bills in SGD and, as a new account, starts out restricted to Singapore. If you need Thai spend on a Thai entity's books in THB, that is a separate Thai account with its own verification and its own home-country-only period. Our earlier piece on account creation before availability covers the sign-up flow that sits in front of all this.

Who is affected

• In-market SMBs and brands in the seven countries. For the first time you can self-serve in your own currency, at a very low published minimum.
• Regional HQs in Singapore. "Available" doesn't mean regional reach on day one. Expect a Singapore-only period first.
• Agencies and holding-group trading desks. The named partners are an official access route. Self-serve accounts still follow the entity-domicile rule and the home-country restriction.
• Fintech, insurance, digital health and legal-services advertisers. The policy's "outside the US" prohibitions apply in all seven markets, and this expansion didn't change them.
• Teams automating through the Advertiser API. Hardcoded USD assumptions, such as the $25 floor or 10000-micro rounding, won't carry over. Read currency_code from the account first.

Recommended actions this week

1. Confirm which legal entity will be billed and where it is based before signing up at ads.openai.com. The eligibility rule is about the billed entity, not the markets you target.
2. Pick the billing currency deliberately. It fixes your minimum row and, per the account-setup article, can't be changed later.
3. Use a card issued in the same country as the entity, and warn finance that the authorization hold may last "8 days or longer".
4. Start identity verification right away. It controls when you can advertise outside your home country.
5. Plan the first flight for your home country only, and add other markets once the account qualifies.
6. Set budgets from bids and learning volume, not from the table. Check that each ad group's highest effective bid is at or below the daily budget.
7. Screen your category against the policy before you build creative, especially for financial, health and legal services.
8. For API builds, read currency_code from GET /ad_account, derive micros from that currency, and run validate_only through the Bulk API before activating. The same account-level rules are covered in our account spending limits guide.

Limits and unknowns

The documentation doesn't currently say any of the following. We're listing them as gaps, not answering them:

• Supported ad languages for any of the seven markets, including whether ads in Thai, Vietnamese, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Melayu, Filipino or Traditional Chinese are supported or reviewed differently.
• Local tax handling. There is no tax FAQ for any of the seven markets (only for Japan), and no list of the tax ID types offered per country.
• Market-specific policy changes. None were published. The only country-specific rules are the general "outside the US" restrictions.
• The home-country spend threshold that unlocks international targeting.
• Whether the geotarget catalog used by the API includes the new markets. We couldn't fetch it.
• Why the new minimums are so much lower than existing ones, and whether they'll stay there.
• Which offices of the named agency groups are onboarded in each market.

Sources

All verified 2026-09-25. Before-and-after comparisons come from Soku's dated captures of the same pages at 00:53 UTC on 2026-09-24 and 00:01 UTC on 2026-09-25. OpenAI doesn't publish a changelog for these articles.

• ChatGPT Ads expands to Southeast Asia and Taiwan (OpenAI, dated 2026-09-23): the seven markets, access routes, named agency partners, "over 60 countries"
• Ads Manager Availability: the 63-country self-service table and the billing-entity rule
• Create Campaigns for ChatGPT Ads: the Minimum Campaign Spend table and the home-country restriction
• Billing & Payment: the authorization-hold wording, card-country matching, tax IDs
• Ads Manager Beta Account Setup: country, currency and time zone fixed at creation
• Daily Budgets: the bid-based daily budget floor and the 2x / 7x pacing limits
• Ads in ChatGPT: ad-language selection
• OpenAI Advertising Policies: v1.6, the financial, health and legal restrictions outside the US
• Targeting (developer docs), Campaigns API, Ad Account API, Bulk API: the developer-side country-code, currency and budget-floor wording