StackAdapt Goes No-Minimum on ChatGPT Ads, and Criteo Is Already Feeling It

Earlier this week, StackAdapt quietly became the most accessible on-ramp to advertising inside ChatGPT. Not through a splashy rebrand or a keynote announcement, but through a pricing decision that the programmatic ad world will be dissecting for months: it removed its minimum spend requirement entirely. No floor. No commitment threshold. Just open access to roughly a billion-user platform that, until very recently, had no ads at all.

What StackAdapt Actually Did

StackAdapt is a demand-side platform, which in plain terms means it sits between advertisers and publishers, routing ad dollars to where they'll land. According to Adweek, the company dropped its minimum spend commitment for ChatGPT ads, opening the channel to advertisers of any budget size. That move matters because it is explicitly contrarian: rivals were still operating with spend floors when StackAdapt pulled the rug on the model. The company did not launch blindly. Digiday reported that StackAdapt started with a closed beta of a double-digit number of clients before deciding the product was ready to scale. Yang Han, co-founder and CTO, put it directly: "We ran a pilot just to make sure everything worked well, and that has been going well. So we're actually releasing it wide this week, it's broadly open on our platform for all our customers." That customer base runs to around 1,000 advertisers, per Digiday, all of whom can now run ChatGPT campaigns without hitting a minimum spend gate.

The Criteo Comparison That Makes

This Interesting StackAdapt's move lands with extra weight because of where Criteo is sitting right now. According to eMarketer, Criteo lowered its ChatGPT spending minimums to $10,000, a reduction framed as opening the door for smaller brands. Ten thousand dollars is genuinely lower than where the channel started, and for an enterprise-grade retargeting platform, that signals real intent to democratize access. But $10,000 is still a meaningful commitment for a creator-run brand, a small agency, or an independent retailer testing a new channel. StackAdapt's answer to that is essentially: the floor is zero. The competitive dynamic here is not subtle. Two named players in the programmatic stack are moving in the same direction at the same moment, which tells you something about where the pressure is coming from: OpenAI itself.

The OpenAI Context Everyone Is Dancing Around None of

this happens in a vacuum. Digiday reported that OpenAI opened its self-serve ads manager to advertisers of all sizes in the U.S. and dropped its own $50,000 minimum spend requirement to attract smaller advertisers. The company's ads and monetization lead, Asad Awan, also indicated that third-party measurement and cost-per-action bidding are both in development, though exact timelines have not been disclosed. That roadmap matters because without third-party measurement, advertisers are largely taking OpenAI's word for what their spend is doing. It is a familiar position for anyone who remembers the early days of Facebook ads or YouTube pre-roll. The ad tech platforms lining up around OpenAI are not doing so out of altruism. Digiday noted that StackAdapt was one of a handful of companies to partner with OpenAI at launch, giving it an early-mover advantage that the no-minimum policy is designed to convert into market share before the ecosystem gets crowded.

What This Means

If You Are Thinking About ChatGPT Ads For creators, marketers, and small business owners who have been watching the ChatGPT ad story from the sidelines, the spend-floor race is genuinely good news. A channel that required a $50,000 commitment three months ago now has a self-serve path with no stated minimum, at least through StackAdapt. The StackAdapt platform page confirms ChatGPT Ads as a live placement option alongside its connected TV, digital out-of-home, and direct mail offerings. The honest caveat is that low entry costs do not guarantee good returns on a channel this new. Third-party measurement is still coming, not here. Performance benchmarks are thin. But the window to experiment before the channel gets expensive and competitive is exactly the kind of window that rewards early learners over early spenders. Watch how Criteo and StackAdapt price this inventory over the next quarter; the direction of those minimums will tell you more about ChatGPT ad market maturity than any press release will.