The hosted app builder now supports co-editing, public links and custom domains, though its headline count says nothing about repeat use.
By [Ryan Merket](/author/ryan-merket)
· Published
Primary source: [ChatGPT on X](https://x.com/ChatGPT/status/2098457920291946894)
Why it matters #
ChatGPT Sites puts app generation, hosting and distribution inside one product. OpenAI's 5M count shows reach; active use will determine whether it becomes a platform.
OpenAI said ChatGPT users have created more than 5 million Sites since the hosted web-app builder launched three months ago, giving the company an early distribution figure for its push to make ChatGPT a place where software is built, published and used.
The company disclosed the figure on September 11th in an eight-post thread on X. OpenAI described Sites as a way for people to build and host functional, interactive web apps without assembling a separate development and deployment stack.
The 5 million figure is a creation count supplied by OpenAI. It does not establish how many people made those Sites, how many were published, how many remain active or whether visitors returned after opening them. One user can create multiple Sites, and OpenAI's public-beta limits apply across all Sites associated with an account. The number still shows how quickly ChatGPT can put a new creation tool in front of a large existing user base.
OpenAI first introduced a preview of Sites on June 2nd as part of an expansion of Codex beyond conventional software development. The initial pitch centered on internal tools such as dashboards, launch trackers and calculators that could be shared with colleagues through a hosted URL. At the time, OpenAI said more than 5 million people used Codex each week, with non-developers accounting for about 20% of users.
That launch positioned Sites as a bridge between prompting and deployment. A user describes a website or app, reviews the generated result, requests changes and publishes it without leaving ChatGPT. OpenAI's current Sites documentation says the product can create interactive websites and lightweight apps from ChatGPT Work on the web or from Work and Codex in the desktop app.
OpenAI is widening the product beyond internal tools
The examples OpenAI highlighted on Friday were largely public, experimental projects rather than workplace dashboards. They included a pixel-art creature-collecting game, a browser-based 3D coloring tool, an alert page combining earthquake and space-weather information, a theatrical calculator, a shared Japanese word-chain game and an interactive visual story about emotional connections with AI.
That selection shows the broader distribution play behind Sites. The June preview emphasized software for teams. Three months later, OpenAI is promoting consumer games, creative experiments and publicly accessible apps hosted on chatgpt.site subdomains. Sites gives ChatGPT users a destination for finished work rather than stopping at generated code or a preview inside a conversation.
OpenAI has also added collaboration controls. A Site owner can grant another eligible member of the same ChatGPT workspace editing access, according to the company's documentation. Collaborators can change the project, save versions and publish later revisions after the owner completes the first deployment. The owner retains control over access, the Site's name and URL, ownership transfers, secrets and custom-domain settings.
Sites can be limited to an owner, selected users or a workspace, while eligible accounts can publish them to the wider internet. OpenAI also supports custom domains where available, although the user must already own the domain and configure its DNS records. Enterprise administrators control whether members can create or publicly publish Sites, and public publishing is disabled by default in Enterprise workspaces.
Five million creations bring a hosting problem with them
OpenAI is still labeling Sites a public beta. The company says plan-specific limits can restrict the creation of new projects, storage or continued public availability for a high-usage Site. Sites also does not support data residency or inference residency at launch, a constraint that matters for organizations deciding whether to publish internal applications through the service.
The company's Sites terms leave creators responsible for their content and for applications that collect information from visitors. OpenAI says Sites cannot process protected health information or payment-card data outside a third-party payment processor, and creators remain responsible for transactions, fulfillment, taxes and customer support if they use a Site for commerce.
Those controls show the operational burden attached to turning generated code into a hosted product. OpenAI is supplying the builder, runtime, storage and URL, while pushing responsibility for what the resulting application does back to its creator.
The 5 million count gives OpenAI a large top-of-funnel number after one quarter. The harder measures will come from what happens after creation: how many Sites attract users, survive beyond an initial experiment and become applications that people rely on. Sites already makes publishing software dramatically easier inside ChatGPT. OpenAI's next task is proving that the output has a life beyond the prompt that produced it.