ChatGPT Plugins (beta)

~ the last words ~

OpenAI announced plugins for ChatGPT on 23 March 2023, as an alpha with a waitlist. For something meant to change what a chatbot could do, the mechanism was unremarkable. You put a small JSON file at a fixed path on your own domain and pointed it at a description of your own API. The model read both and worked out when to call you. That description file was the entire integration contract.

Two of the first plugins were OpenAI's: web browsing and a code interpreter. The other eleven came from outside, and the roster now reads as a snapshot of what people assumed this was for. Expedia and OpenTable were on it. So was Wolfram, whose job on that list was the arithmetic the model kept getting wrong.

In May 2023 the beta opened to every ChatGPT Plus subscriber and the plugin store filled up. Then OpenAI showed GPTs at its developer day on 6 November 2023 and opened a store for those on 10 January 2024. Plugin installs and new plugin conversations stopped on 19 March 2024. The help center stated the ending in one line: as of 9 April 2024, conversations with plugins could no longer be continued.

~ the record ~

~ eleven partners and a json file ~

The appeal was the absence of machinery. There was no SDK to adopt and no runtime to host anything in, because the thing being hosted was already yours. A developer with a service that already answered HTTP could describe it in a format the model understood and be inside ChatGPT the same week. Plenty of small companies did exactly that, including some that did not outlive the mechanism.

The manifest assumed your service had a public address and a certificate in front of it. Edge deployments have neither. A model that runs on a drone or on a camera sits behind hardware with no route in from outside. That is a dull reason to have sat out a platform moment, and it was mine.

~ what the store replaced ~

A GPT was configured in a form on OpenAI's site: instructions in one box, plus whatever files you wanted it to read. OpenAI then listed the result in a store it ran itself. Its own position was that GPTs had full feature parity with plugins and a good deal more besides, and as a description of what a user could do that was true. The replacement was not a better plugin. It was a plugin that lived on OpenAI's side of the line, where the listing and the billing could both be managed.

~ the word came back ~

On 9 July 2026 OpenAI renamed ChatGPT apps to plugins and replaced its App Directory with a Plugin Directory. Nothing from 2023 came back with the name. What sits under a 2026 plugin is the apps and connector machinery built after the original beta died. The word itself was simply free again.

chat.openai.com, the address where the store lived, now forwards to chatgpt.com. The only place the old dates are written down in full is the help center article OpenAI published to wind the beta down.

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