ChatGPT Plugin Categories

See also: List of ChatGPT Plugins, ChatGPT Plugins and Plugins

ChatGPT Plugin Categories is an index of the topical groupings used to organize third-party plugins that extended ChatGPT during the 2023 to 2024 plugin era operated by OpenAI. At its peak in late 2023 the plugin store offered roughly one thousand plugins spread across more than sixty categories, ranging from Academic Research and Cybersecurity to Travel and Weather.^[6] The plugin program let outside developers connect their services to ChatGPT through a manifest file and an OpenAPI specification, allowing the chatbot to call live APIs, fetch real-time information, and act on behalf of users.^[1] OpenAI announced plugins on March 23, 2023,^[1] disabled new plugin conversations on March 19, 2024,^[4] and fully retired the feature on April 9, 2024,^[4] superseding it with Custom GPTs and the GPT Store, first shown at OpenAI's DevDay on November 6, 2023.^[3] This page treats the category list as a historical reference and remains useful for tracing how the early ecosystem of large language model tool-use was first organized for end users.

Many of those categories survive in altered form within the GPT Store today, but the underlying plugin architecture (manifest plus OpenAPI plus user opt-in) was retired in favor of native Actions inside individual GPTs.^[3] Plugins were exclusive to paying ChatGPT Plus subscribers, who paid 20 dollars per month for access to the GPT-4 model required to run them.^[2]

when were ChatGPT plugins released and shut down?

OpenAI announced ChatGPT Plugins on March 23, 2023 in a blog post titled "ChatGPT plugins," describing the feature as the company's "first plugins" for the chatbot and characterizing them as a way to help ChatGPT "access up-to-date information, run computations, or use third-party services."^[1] The initial alpha launched with a small slate of partner integrations including Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier, plus two first-party plugins from OpenAI: a code interpreter and a browsing tool.^[1][9] Access was gated behind a waitlist and rolled out gradually to ChatGPT Plus subscribers throughout the spring of 2023.^[1]

In mid-May 2023 OpenAI broadened access. On May 12, 2023 the company announced that web browsing and plugins would become available to all Plus subscribers the following week, and on May 19, 2023 the plugin store opened to all ChatGPT Plus customers, making the catalog of third-party plugins generally accessible.^[2] By the second half of 2023 the store had grown to several hundred plugins organized into the categories listed below, with a public discovery interface inside ChatGPT.

On November 6, 2023 OpenAI held its inaugural DevDay conference in San Francisco. There, chief executive Sam Altman introduced GPTs (custom versions of ChatGPT that anyone could build without code) and the upcoming GPT Store.^[3] The accompanying blog post, "Introducing GPTs," described GPTs as a successor concept that combined custom instructions, knowledge files, and Actions (the new name for plugin-style API calls) inside a single shareable assistant.^[3] OpenAI told developers the same day that plugins would be deprecated in favor of GPTs, and the plugin store stopped accepting new submissions shortly afterward.^[3]

The deprecation ran on a two-stage timeline announced in a help-center notice titled "Winding down the ChatGPT plugins beta."^[4] OpenAI disabled the creation of new plugin conversations on March 19, 2024, while allowing users to continue any existing plugin conversation through April 9, 2024, after which plugins were fully removed.^[4] OpenAI's stated rationale was concise: "We're winding down the plugins beta on April 9, as GPTs offer a better way to reach ChatGPT users."^[4] The notice pointed users and developers to GPTs and the GPT Store for equivalent functionality.^[4]

how did ChatGPT plugins work?

The ChatGPT plugin system used a relatively thin specification on top of standard web technologies. A developer who wanted to publish a plugin needed to host two artifacts on their domain:

1. A plugin manifest file named ai-plugin.json, served at /.well-known/ai-plugin.json. The manifest declared metadata such as the human-readable name, a description for humans, a description for the model, the authentication scheme, the URL of the OpenAPI specification, and contact and legal information.^[1]
2. An OpenAPI specification (formerly known as Swagger) describing the available endpoints, parameters, and response shapes. ChatGPT used the OpenAPI document to plan calls and to validate the structure of inputs and outputs.^[1]

When a user enabled a plugin in ChatGPT, the model was given the natural-language description of the plugin and a compact representation of its OpenAPI surface. During a conversation the model could decide that a user request matched a plugin's capabilities, generate a structured request, and call the plugin endpoint over HTTPS. The plugin returned data (typically JSON), which ChatGPT would then summarize back to the user. Authentication options included no auth, service-level API keys, user-level API keys, and OAuth.^[1]

Users reached plugins through the ChatGPT Plus interface. After selecting the GPT-4 model, a user could open the plugin store, install up to three plugins per conversation, and toggle them on.^[2] The chatbot would then route relevant requests through those plugins automatically.

why were ChatGPT plugins deprecated?

OpenAI gave several public reasons for sunsetting plugins in favor of GPTs and Actions:^[3]

• Discovery problems. The plugin store's flat catalog made it hard for users to find the right plugin for a task and harder still for developers to gain visibility. GPTs were positioned as named, branded assistants that could appear in a curated store with creator profiles.^[3]
• Single-purpose limits. A plugin could only expose API endpoints. A GPT, by contrast, bundled custom instructions, uploaded knowledge files, and Actions in one package, which OpenAI argued made the resulting assistants more useful out of the box.^[3]
• Conversation friction. Activating plugins required users to choose the GPT-4 model, open a separate plugin picker, and toggle individual plugins. With GPTs, the assistant carried its own configuration, so a user simply opened the GPT and started chatting.^[3]
• Developer economics. OpenAI announced at DevDay that GPT creators would eventually be eligible for revenue sharing through the GPT Store, an incentive that the plugin program never offered.^[3]

The Actions framework that powers GPTs is a near-direct evolution of plugin infrastructure. It still uses an OpenAPI specification and supports the same authentication options, so most plugin developers were able to port their backends to a GPT with limited code changes.^[3]

comprehensive table of categories

The table below lists every plugin category that has a corresponding article on this wiki. Each entry links to the dedicated category page where notable plugins are catalogued. Categories are presented in alphabetical order.

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category list (alphabetical)

The following bulleted list preserves the original alphabetical index of categories that this page first carried. Each link points to a dedicated category article that catalogs the plugins published in that area.

• Academic Research
• Advertising
• App Development
• Art
• Artificial Intelligence
• Beverage
• Business
• Cars
• Charity
• Collectibles
• Cryptocurrency
• Cybersecurity
• Data Analysis
• Data Visualization
• Design
• Digital Media
• E-Commerce
• Education
• Employment
• Entertainment
• Environment
• Fashion
• Finance
• Food
• Gaming
• Geography
• Health
• IT Management
• Internet
• Language Learning
• Law
• Legal
• Lifestyle
• Marketing
• Media
• Music
• News
• Photography
• Podcasts
• Politics
• Productivity
• Programming
• Real Estate
• Religion
• SEO
• Science
• Search Engine
• Self-Improvement
• Shopping
• Social Media
• Software
• Software Development
• Space
• Sports
• Technology
• Transportation
• Travel
• Weather
• Web Development
• Web Services
• Writing

notable plugins by category

While the List of ChatGPT Plugins provides the full catalog tracked on this wiki, a small number of plugins serve as useful exemplars of what each broad category looked like in practice.

e-commerce

The E-Commerce category covered shopping, comparison, and merchant integrations. A representative entry is the BuyWisely (ChatGPT Plugin), released on May 20, 2023, which compared prices and surfaced offers from thousands of online shops in Australia. Other widely cited e-commerce plugins from the launch lineup included Shopify, which let merchants surface their stores inside ChatGPT, and Klarna, which provided a price comparison and product search experience.^[1]

technology

The Technology category collected hardware, gadget, and broadly technical utilities. The Speechki (ChatGPT Plugin), also released on May 20, 2023, is a representative example: it converted ChatGPT text output into ready-to-use audio, returning a download link, an audio player page, or an embeddable player.

food and groceries

In the launch slate, Instacart was a high-profile food and grocery plugin that let users ask about recipes, identify the ingredients they needed, and order them from local stores in the United States.^[1] Although the wiki tracks this kind of plugin under the broader Food Delivery rubric, it remains a canonical example of how a major retail brand used the plugin protocol.

travel

Travel was one of the most heavily represented categories at launch, with Expedia, Kayak, and OpenTable all participating in the alpha.^[1] These plugins let ChatGPT search flights, hotels, and restaurant reservations directly through partner APIs, and they were widely cited in coverage of the plugin announcement as evidence that mainstream consumer brands were willing to integrate with a chatbot interface.^[8][10]

computation and reference

Wolfram (sometimes called Wolfram Alpha) was the canonical computation plugin. It exposed Wolfram's symbolic, mathematical, and curated-data engine to ChatGPT and was held up by OpenAI in the initial blog post as an example of how plugins could give a language model access to authoritative computation that the base model could not do reliably on its own.^[1]

productivity and integration

Zapier let ChatGPT trigger thousands of automated workflows across other software, and Slack let teams summarize channel activity. Both plugins were cited at launch as evidence that the plugin store was aimed at workplace productivity as well as consumer use cases.^[1]

what replaced ChatGPT plugins?

At OpenAI DevDay on November 6, 2023, the company introduced two products that together replaced plugins:^[3]

• GPTs are bundles of custom instructions, knowledge files, and Actions that anyone with a ChatGPT Plus, Team, or Enterprise account can build through a conversational builder. A GPT carries its own personality, scope, and toolset, and it appears in the GPT Store as a discrete branded assistant.^[3]
• Actions are the plugin-equivalent layer inside a GPT. They use the same OpenAPI-based contract as plugins did, with similar authentication options, and they let a GPT call external HTTP endpoints to fetch data or perform tasks.^[3]

Developers who maintained ChatGPT plugins in 2023 generally migrated their backends to Actions during the winter of 2023 to 2024. Because the OpenAPI surface remained largely the same, the migration was usually a matter of repackaging the plugin behind a new GPT rather than reimplementing the underlying API.

The GPT Store officially opened on January 10, 2024. By launch day users had already created more than 3 million custom GPTs, and the store featured categories for DALL-E, writing, productivity, research, programming, education, and lifestyle, among others.^[5] Many of the plugin categories cataloged on this page have a clear analog in the GPT Store taxonomy, although the GPT Store's groupings are coarser and there is no longer a one-to-one mapping between the older plugin categories and the newer GPT categories.

reception

Reception of the plugin program was mixed. Industry coverage at launch in March 2023 (in outlets including The Verge, TechCrunch, Reuters, and Wired) framed plugins as a major step toward turning ChatGPT into a general-purpose assistant.^[8][9][10] Commentators compared the plugin store to the iPhone App Store, and several pieces speculated that ChatGPT might become a dominant platform for consumer software discovery.

By the second half of 2023 the tone had shifted. Reviewers and developers raised three recurring concerns:

• Reliability. Plugins frequently failed to invoke correctly, returned errors, or were used inappropriately by the model. Because the model decided when to call a plugin, users often could not tell why a plugin was or was not used.
• Discovery. With several hundred plugins in the store and only a flat list to browse, users struggled to find the right plugin for any given task. Developers reported low installation numbers as a result.
• Three-plugin limit. A user could only have three plugins active in a single conversation, which made plugin combinations awkward and forced users to plan their plugin selection ahead of a chat.^[2]

OpenAI's pivot to GPTs at DevDay 2023 was widely interpreted as a response to these criticisms.^[3] By packaging instructions, knowledge, and Actions inside a single named assistant, OpenAI shifted discovery away from a plugin marketplace and toward a marketplace of named applications, which the company argued would be easier for users to navigate.^[3]

lessons learned

The ChatGPT plugin era left a lasting mark on the broader large language model ecosystem in several ways:

1. OpenAPI as the lingua franca. The plugin program normalized OpenAPI as the way to describe an API to a language model. The same pattern reappears in GPT Actions, in Claude's tool use through the Model Context Protocol, and in many open-source agent frameworks.
2. User opt-in matters. Plugins required explicit user activation before a model could call an external service. The principle that an assistant should not silently call third-party APIs has been retained in nearly every successor system, even as the ergonomics have changed.
3. Discovery is the hard problem. The single most cited difficulty of the plugin store was discovery, and it remains the central challenge of every successor marketplace, including the GPT Store and the marketplaces operated by other AI vendors.
4. Categorization persists. The same broad categories that organized the plugin store (productivity, travel, finance, education, and so on) reappear in every later directory of language model applications. The taxonomy presented on this page therefore continues to be useful as a snapshot of how the early consumer AI application landscape was organized for end users.

see also

• ChatGPT Plugins
• List of ChatGPT Plugins
• Custom GPTs
• GPT Store
• OpenAI DevDay
• Actions
• Plugins
• ChatGPT
• OpenAI

References

1. OpenAI. "ChatGPT plugins." OpenAI Blog, March 23, 2023. Original announcement of the plugin program with the launch partner list, the ai-plugin.json manifest, and the OpenAPI specification model. ↩
2. OpenAI. "Web browsing and Plugins for all Plus users." OpenAI announcement, May 12, 2023, with general availability rolled out the week of May 19, 2023; plugins required a ChatGPT Plus subscription (20 dollars per month) and the GPT-4 model, with a limit of three active plugins per conversation. ↩
3. OpenAI. "Introducing GPTs." OpenAI Blog, November 6, 2023. DevDay announcement of GPTs, the GPT Store, Actions, and the deprecation of plugins. ↩
4. OpenAI Help Center. "Winding down the ChatGPT plugins beta." Notice published February 23, 2024: new plugin conversations were disabled on March 19, 2024, and existing plugin conversations ended on April 9, 2024. ↩
5. OpenAI. "Introducing the GPT Store." OpenAI Blog, January 10, 2024. Launch of the GPT Store as the successor marketplace, with more than 3 million custom GPTs already created and categories spanning DALL-E, writing, productivity, research, programming, education, and lifestyle. ↩
6. Wikipedia contributors. "ChatGPT." Wikipedia, accessed 2026. Background on ChatGPT product history including the plugin and GPT Store eras. ↩
7. Wikipedia contributors. "OpenAI." Wikipedia, accessed 2026. Corporate background on the company that launched and retired the plugin program.
8. The Verge. "OpenAI is massively expanding ChatGPT's capabilities to let it browse the web and more." March 23, 2023. News coverage of the plugin launch. ↩
9. TechCrunch. "OpenAI connects ChatGPT to the internet." March 23, 2023. News coverage of the plugin launch and partner lineup. ↩
10. Reuters. "OpenAI launches plugins for ChatGPT." March 24, 2023. Wire coverage of the plugin program announcement. ↩