OpenAI, why are you killing my startup — for the second time?

GPT builders
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By a founder who built on your platform, twice

Lead: Twice in two cycles, a single platform owner’s move has erased my business. I’m asking OpenAI to answer publicly: Why are you killing my startup again—and what protections do small builders have when platform decisions duplicate our work and erase our revenue overnight?

The first hit: when “reasoning” was not a feature—and builders coaxed it with prompts

Let me be precise about the history. When you launched the Custom GPT store, I used disciplined prompt engineering to make GPT-4 slow down just a little, pause, and follow a fixed sequence before answering. Back then, GPT-4 did not have native reasoning. What I built wasn’t today’s reasoning; it was a fragile but inspiring first seed—a deliberate slowdown and step order that showed the possibility of reasoning-like behavior.

That early work sent a shock through the community. I still have a video interview from that period where someone says “GPT-4 has reasoning now.” Builders knew that wasn’t true; it was our prompts doing the heavy lifting. Still, the idea took off. Copycats multiplied inside the store, repackaging the approach while I received no credit, no recognition, and no path to share in the value.

Only later, when you introduced ChatGPT 01 (the point at which you baked reasoning into the system itself), did the platform truly adopt reasoning as a native capability. So to be clear: my differentiator came with the Custom GPT era (prompt-driven slowdown and ordered steps). Reasoning as a built-in product behavior arrived later with ChatGPT 01—and that’s when the platform finally absorbed what we, the builders, had been prototyping by hand.

The second hit: flashcards, quizzes, and interactive games—wiped out in a day

I tried again—a new product, a new niche, real traction. Through prompt engineering and workflow design, I built a system that generates, hosts, and assembles study materials on the fly: flashcards, quizzes, and interactive games, all from a short user prompt. It wasn’t just text in chat; it created live study pages, hosted instantly, and tuned to what students needed.

For two months, I grew modestly—enough to cover hosting and keep building. My tools:

Then, overnight, OpenAI moved into the same outcome lane—flashcards, quizzes, interactive study—and my users told me they no longer needed my service. Refund requests poured in. Revenue vanished. I woke up to a business wiped out, for the second time, by the platform I depend on.

I’m not asking for a monopoly. I am saying a platform should not repeatedly absorb the signature value its independent builders create—without notice, credit, or remedy.

This is bigger than one founder

Platform risk is real; we all accept that APIs change. But there’s a difference between platform evolution and what feels like expropriation of community innovations. If builders believe their best ideas will be studied, generalized, and absorbed into core without acknowledgment, they will stop building on your stack. That hurts everyone—users, developers, and ultimately the platform itself.

What I can show

I can share the video interview, redacted customer messages, and a detailed timeline.

Questions OpenAI should answer—publicly

  1. What safeguards exist for third-party builders when their signature workflows and outcomes are adopted into core features?

  2. Do internal teams review Custom GPTs, prompts, or usage patterns in ways that inform product decisions? If so, what guardrails and audit trails exist?

  3. What’s the policy for “graduating” community innovations into the platform? Is there credit, compensation, or partnership?

  4. Will you commit to a notice period before launching functionality that materially overlaps with high-usage third-party offerings in your ecosystem?

  5. Can affected builders opt into revenue-share, co-branding, or integration partnerships when their category is absorbed?

  6. Where is the appeals and remediation process for builders who can document business harm?

A fair remedy—concrete steps

  • 90-day advance notice for major overlaps with popular third-party use cases.

  • Opt-in revenue share or referral credit for categories clearly pioneered by community builders.

  • Co-builder partnerships (credit on launch pages, shared usage data, roadmap input).

  • API parity and migration guarantees so small teams aren’t left rewriting from scratch.

  • Transparency reports naming community patterns that inspired features and how originators were engaged.

  • A marketplace ethics charter that explicitly rejects mining and undercutting top creators.

To readers, investors, and fellow builders

This isn’t a tantrum—it’s a case study in the power imbalance between a platform and a dependent entrepreneur. Twice now, a single decision above my head erased months of work. If we want a healthy AI economy, we need rules of the road that let small teams innovate without being flattened the moment they succeed.

OpenAI has the chance to set that standard. Acknowledge the impact, answer these questions in public, and adopt policies that protect the ecosystem that proves your technology’s value in the real world.

Final word to OpenAI

You’ve killed my startup—twice. First, during the Custom GPT era, when my prompt-driven slowdown and step ordering seeded the idea of reasoning before it existed natively; then you made reasoning a system feature later with ChatGPT 01. And now, again, your study features land directly on the outcomes I built—flashcards, quizzes, interactive games—and my customers walk away.

I’m asking for acknowledgment, transparency, and a fair path forward. Engage with me. Review the evidence. Recognize the contribution. And help ensure the next builder isn’t writing this same article a few months from now.

Signed,
A founder who still believes in building—just not in being erased.

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ay bro bro

on the real your customers prolly walk away due to there being more robust products big dog.

theres at least 100 various projects on these forums, at least 10 big projects, im not part of any of those. but as a solo dev - openai is legit helpful , not just as a service, but like… as a platform. anyone reading this can legitematly learn pro level skills in months using openai.
you said this

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to this i say open ai gives you access to the following :slight_smile:

Vm machine usage for those who dont have rigs that can run low grade software

MCP server / platform for collaboration and project management

access to a ai that is general purpose but also basically a on call expert in a whole lot of areas ranging from baking mac n cheese, to building a operational ai that can control crispr and gene manipulate [ actually]

they aint out here tearing people down, stealing tech, or hindering us builders, quite the opposite, they empower us pretty hard core, and if someone was poineering anything, the community would gravitate to it, and then rev share would be redundant, look at lovable ai. look at several start ups.

co builder partnership ? running ai takes GPU - just running the OSS takes a pretty beefy card even as a consumer with at least 12 gigs of vram that puts that 1 peice of tech for 1 user at a cool 1000 to 2k+ depending on the other hardware- internet connection, maintence, oh man the server cost alone…

doing that for 100 million users? yea bro if they have that kinda bread they DEF dont need to kill anyones start up.

api parity? teams accounts get access to alot - bro bro -

and transparency? again, im a independant entrepreneur with a pretty public track record of buisness ownership and creation. as 1 use case of many, im on the other end of the fence, openai is out here making us small guys feel real big.

if you have flashcards, quizzes and interactive games, i suggest migrating to a higher tier graphics , develop on unreal engine 5.6 or pygames, your custom gpt can be wired using 4o and TSL rotation , because 4o doesnt like having self secured connections, and then you can wire that to a website using fastapi and then that you can make a .ai website and seem legit - like so many others do, and open ai empowers you to do this.

they dont need internal teams to do this

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because the ai system itself monitors that

and thats not even the api bro bro - let have rules, for ai, they are called guardrails, one .. for example in their rules is “ you may not train a competing llm” thats a rule for ai .

as for ChatGPT - AI for Medical Students

your custom GPT that caps at 128k window , and onlyreads the first 500 lines of each one of those 20 alloted uploaded files, and cant even statically connect to a stable domain?

brother - its because people who build use the api … and when you do that… you dont have to worry about 99% of the problems you listed, because the data, orchestration, software created, is all owned locally. whereas when you host via custom gpt, you are on they stuff.

LIKE bro you cant even wire HIPA regulation into your custom GPT, whilst its cool you made a study partner, what buisness you running on that with no certs or protections?

the bigger issue tho? how you running a buisness on a custom gpt that you cant even get log data from? that you cant change the behavior of, THEY even went as far as to release a version of gpt you can download and run locally absent a internet connection that is unequivicolly better than i dare say “ all” custom gpts, because its 4o in a box…that you can teach. brother… thats like google giving away free internet without commercials and saying Oh hey heres the exact blueprint to making your own AWS/CLOUD services..

which lowkey…. openai does that too. which is you should scope their TOS

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It might be best to think of GPTs like modern day Excel spreadsheets… You can vibe-code some handy macros to quickly enhance your workflow, but they’re not yet something you can fully run a business on.

If you’d like inspiration, check out other projects on the forum to see how people are tackling these issues and what tools they’re using: Topics tagged project

Best of luck making your future projects more robust!

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Please stop saying “use the API” or “just do RAG”—I know how; that misses the point. Imagine you sell hand-painted custom sneakers and Walmart clones them and floods every store. Whether my shop is wood, clay, or even API, the build doesn’t matter; scale wins. OpenAI took the core of my idea and baked it into their platform, and I can’t out-distribute a company worth ~$500B. That’s the issue.

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My guy, with all due respect, you are whinning about something that was inevitable. Any AI by its very nature is always going to evolve and launch new features that were once overcomplicated prompts, or stuff that were once “add-ons” of some sort.

OpenAI “didn’t kill your startup” twice.

Or what, should OpenAI just delay updates for the whole world just because you were charging for stuff that can be done for free? Give me a break, bro.

You had an unsustainable, and temporary business model and that is that, move on. You seem like a creative guy, you’ll be alright.

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Look at the industry: OpenAI, Google, Facebook, xAI—these giants copy features and now even poach talent. The target isn’t “fix the creator”; it’s fix the environment.

You may think fixing unethical corporate AI companies is too much for regular people like us—but remember, we once thought rock can’t think, and now the “silicon rock” can think! I’m doing my part, and I won’t stay silent.

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My heart goes out to the CEO whose business was shut down. It is tough to imagine your skills and business being replaced by all this AI stuff—graphic design, thumbnail design, coding, and more.

I am still grateful for ChatGPT in many ways, but I am not going to put all my eggs in one basket, only to wake up one day and find that ChatGPT has taken away my bread and butter.

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You would be taken more seriously when you start typing your replies by yourself instead of using the very thing you are whinning on, to write them for you.

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@TechTitan My guy, why comment with your alt account?

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big dog…

walmart doesnt care when target cant handle buizness

and walmart has the customer base to not have to worry about competition

you as a dev rely solely on custom gpts for buisness then posted on the forums and reddit to accomplish what? when with your apparent skillset, using the api counters all of your issues.

neither i, nor open ai, care what product you make, be that custom anime figurines from ai controlled 3d printers? to anime books, to datasets, to training corpos, as long as you follow their guidelines/gaurdrails your gucci,

so my post wasnt to argue with you - it was to kinda say .. you had a single point of failure irl and you complaining python doesnt fix it for you… make an ai to make ai. if you were able to make 1 idea, why cant you make 30 ideas. they even give you the tools to have their propietary system make ideas for you…

if i had custom shoes, i would have the following , social media post displaying my artistic ownership, documents that validate my ownership, other forms of art that establish a style.

since we are talking about custom gpts, you took a pair of nikes, painted them, created a buisness around those nikes and then expected nike to not ship those same shoes? naw bro bro , thats what IP is, and openai leases you access to their ip. thats the deal.

if you got a teams account, put a organization behind that - that also solves your problem.

if you can prove its your IP - there are protects as i assume you are american given the diction. as a buisness owner you already know this.

circling back to your original point : “ I have a buisness tailoring to medical students using flash cards and no graphics interactive games in 2025, using custom gpts and openai stole my idea”

circling back to my original point : “ using openai teams account + api is pretty normal for buisness owners who use their platform to run buizness, you having no fault tolerance, no customer base, no redudancy in case of model switch or update, no docs, no org, not even exterior connections using connectors in your custom gpt, nor using their codex, or lol their api, displays its highly unlikely that the same billion dollar company that could be federated learning their 100+ million plus user base and i dont know.. crank our operational buisness ideas and ai centric software faster than ANY of us can type automatically… and them NOT be doing this, is a pretty good indication they arent scoping out every person using it. especially around custom gpts which are for a lack of better word, inferior in every manner, to the api system for buisness.

using your own analogy , walmart trying to sell fertilizer as cereal would open the door for kmart to come back and take all their customer base. rebranding walmarts products as your own “ this is called white labeling in buisness btw” bad strat, and openai factually lets you white label in a way - like what, people reskin and wrap their software everyday. You didnt. You should. problem solved.

as a personal touch - i unno why you - or many others roll out on forums labeling openai the enemy or big brother that taking your lunch money. would you even have had the buisness if they didnt give you access? if yes, then why are they responsible for your loss? if no - then brother, just make another buisness,

heres what you can do using the custom gpt today - go to nrok, get their free sub { this is because custom gpt accept safe tls which ngrok free provides that a static domain wont"] use that to use the connectors feature to connect to your openai schema that you host on that free domain , this gives you the ability to build with the custom gpt - using the custom gpt. wire it , to a ruleset, in the 20 files, have 1 of them be your directory + env data, the same issue people are having right now with oath? is bypassed. you cant do this with gpt 5 for the same reason. then connect that openai schema to a tunneled website, download docker - containerize your products and reverse proxy them to a front end using the same domain ngrok gave you - extend that with “extensions” from docker = easy endpoints, now your custom gpt can use tools through those end points, YOU CAN EVEN at this point, link it to a custom MCP server - that provides services.

since youll want to be using post - this works - hope this helps you get back into buisness

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bonus bonus - since you are tailoring to “students” why didnt you also link your custom gpt to discord

since its dumb easy - and then place your custom gpt IN a discord bot?

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You’ve got me wrong. Your whole post tries to say I’m nothing without AI. It’s the opposite: AI is nothing without reasoning. Look at GPT-4.5—expensive, but it still falls down because it doesn’t truly reason. I’m the person who introduced that reasoning, and I can prove it. I’ve already asked OpenAI to review my claim and judge it on real evidence. Whether you think I’m a nobody doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that OpenAI handles this fairly. If I’m right, they should say so—because I’m the one taking the hit here. Please be ethical and verify.

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brother… im 38… starcraft 2 has “ai reasoning” your telling me your the godfather of ai reasoning? cmon now….

so almost what, 25 years ago? also counter strike… ai… has reasoning… bots have had reasoning for a long time..

and im not saying your nothing, im saying, as a skilled dev, why are you hindered by 1 fault. just build again.

i dare say… artificial intelligence, has had reasoning every since 3.14 floppys were used, HOW intelligent that reasoning varies. and my guy if you can design that, that would make you a systems architect, thats up my ally. if you had that skillset brother, wouldnt you just roll your custom gpt into a react app and package it, and distro it through patheon/gumroad/kofi = also solves your issue, just remeber tho, follow openai guidelines - your also waiting for them to respond to you via gpt builders?

they have community managers that sit around reaching out to people all day brother. not the forums guys - directly from their prod team. just watch your email .

ive provided actionable steps to aid and solve your problem. using the same manner stated above bro, you can have higher teir reasoning in discord in a few days , you can also establish “federated learning” through the same process, and that… thats lowkey the start of a SAAS.

you can take the free sauce given, and grow a product they would poach/buy/aquihire or you can do whatever you want brother, you are grown. im not on here to argue with you - i took the time to post because i like to try to help /shrug

copy everything i said, screenshot it, w/e paste it into GPT and ask your custom GPT model if im onto something. i promise you. it will help,

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Look, by your logic, dinosaurs “had reasoning” too—after all, they were around over 200 million years ago and could move, hunt, and turn their heads. But basic movement and instinct aren’t the same as human-level reasoning. Twitching a neck isn’t planning, explaining steps, or solving new problems.

Saying “AI reasoning was invented 25 years ago” blurs that same line. If it were truly solved back then, early ChatGPT versions would’ve had solid step-by-step reasoning from day one. Ideas always build on older ideas, sure—but what matters is who actually made modern models reason in a useful, testable way. I’m claiming I did that work, and I can back it with real evidence. So let’s stick to proof, not history tricks.

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alright, i got you - wheres your patent? your git tracking your coded work? your log data? telemetry? where is your timestamps for the coding? what platform did you code it in? surely you as a dev backed up the originals? did you make a blueprint brother? a SRS [ systems requirement sheet] ? im here to help.

did you make one of these

you mentioned testable way – so what form of testing, pytest? semantic testing? logic?

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you mentioned logic, so heres something https://openmdao.org/
go there

get the opensource, NASA uses this bro bro …

its on a MIT license i think, might be apache, not sure

you can fork this and viola, you now have a higer teir logic that most people wont use

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I’m not feeling helped by your approach. If you truly wanted to help, you’d start by asking questions and looking at evidence—not by judging me first and then lecturing me on how to “be a good developer.”

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why would “ i “ look at evidence bro? i dont represent openai, i dont work for them or anyone - i like you are a student of ai, and im here to learn, occasionally i post in random forums , to share what i know - thats what forums are for. Im not here to tell you how to be a good dev, that doesnt aid anything. Im here voicing logic, logically speaking, if one is smart enough to make and run a start up - then they are also “likely” to be smart enough to carry conversations that further the ability of others who read it.

I asked questions - where is your patent, thats the only evidence that matters, if you aint got that, NO one here, can help you. period.

and yea, im texan, i 100% do judge books by its cover, no one on earth is going to convince me a dictionary is a comic book. So if it looks like a comic book, im going to think its a comic book, if i open it and it has BHAM anywhere on any page - its a comic book. You posted in the forums, ignored my myriad of questions - thats cool no biggie you dont owe me a reponse lol but like i dunno man…

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You opened by saying you’re not looking for evidence because you don’t represent OpenAI, then closed by asking for my patent—i.e., evidence. That’s a clear contradiction. I’m not going to chase shifting goalposts. Thanks, and have a good day.