ChatGPT
OpenAI's assistant in a browser tab, a desktop app and a phone app, where you ask questions, draft text, and hand it files or spreadsheets to work through.
What you'd use it for
Getting a usable first draft, summary or answer out of a document, a spreadsheet or a half-formed idea without leaving the chat window.
- Upload a spreadsheet and ask what the numbers are doing, and get a chart plus the workings back
- Point the desktop app at a folder on your own machine instead of uploading files one at a time
- Send a research question off to read twenty-odd sources and return a cited brief, on Plus and above
- Talk to it by voice on a phone and get a spoken answer back while your hands are busy
- Connect Google Drive, Slack or SharePoint on a Business plan so it answers out of your own files
The verdict
The broadest general assistant on the market, and the one with the fewest rough edges for someone who has never used one. The $20 a month buys headroom rather than intelligence — longer files accepted, reasoning models available, deep research, and a queue you are not standing in on a busy afternoon. If you are choosing between this and Claude, decide on which one you will actually open on a Monday morning, because the capability gap is narrower than either company would like you to think.
What it costs
| Tier | Price | For | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Finding out whether the thing is useful to you at all. | Everyday chat, voice, image generation and file uploads, at lower limits. |
| Plus | $20/month, billed monthly — OpenAI does not offer annual billing on Plus | One person using it as a daily working tool. | Priority access at busy times, higher message limits, reasoning models, deep research. |
| Pro | $100/month (Pro 5x) or $200/month (Pro 20x) | Someone who hits Plus limits in the middle of real work. | 5x or 20x the usage allowance of Plus, plus Codex and the largest model allowances. |
| Business — Standard seat | $20/month if billed annually, $25/month if billed monthly | Teams of 2 to 200 who need one administered workspace. | SAML, SSO and MFA, central billing, connectors to Google Workspace and Slack, no training on your data. |
| Business — Premium seat | $100/month if billed annually, $125/month if billed monthly | The handful of people in a team who use it hardest. | 5x the usage of a standard seat with no five-hour limit; seat types can be mixed in one workspace. |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing, arranged with sales | Organisations buying at the org level with a compliance function. | Credit-based or token-based billing, Codex-only seat types, domain verification, SCIM. |
Read from ChatGPT's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.
What you need to start
- An email address, or a Google, Microsoft or Apple account, to sign in
- Age 13 or over to use it at all, and 18 or over for any paid plan
- macOS 14 or later, or Windows 10 build 17763 or later, if you want the desktop app
- A Plus, Pro or Business plan for deep research, reasoning models and the Google Drive connector
Under two minutes from the sign-up page to your first answer, and roughly ten more if you also install the desktop app and sign in there.
Your first run Sign in with an email address or a Google account and you are typing into a chat box inside two minutes. Paste in a real document of yours and ask what it is missing, and the first answer worth keeping usually arrives in the same sitting.
Where it breaks
There is a cheaper tier called Go that sits between Free and Plus; its price is set per country and is not published on any page we could read, so it is not listed above. New sign-ups to the $200 Pro tier have been paused since 10 September 2026, and existing subscribers who cancel may not be able to buy it back. No individual plan offers annual billing, so the monthly figure is the real figure.
Browser, macOS and Windows desktop apps, iOS and Android. The desktop app is the one worth installing — it can reach files on your machine instead of making you upload them one at a time.
First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.
When not to use it
If your working day already lives in Gmail, Drive and Docs, Gemini starts with your files in hand and this one starts with an empty box. If you want work to run overnight with nobody in the chair, no chat assistant does that — that is Make or Zapier. And if what you need is a written commitment that your inputs never reach a training set, that comes with a Business seat, not the $20 personal one.
Most people’s first encounter with AI at work is this one, and the volume of that first encounter distorts the picture: ChatGPT is not the only assistant, it is the one everyone happened to try.
What you get for $20 a month is not a cleverer answer. It is fewer refusals to work — longer files accepted, reasoning models available, deep research that goes and reads twenty pages before replying, and priority when the servers are busy. That last one sounds trivial until a Tuesday afternoon when the free tier is queueing.
Where the money actually goes
- The desktop app. It can open a folder and read what is in it. The browser tab cannot, and the two are marketed identically.
- Connectors. Google Drive, Slack, GitHub and Microsoft 365, on the Business plans. This is the step from “knows what I pasted” to “knows where my work lives”.
- Usage headroom. Almost everything above Plus is buying allowance, not capability.
Choosing between this and the alternatives
Against Claude the honest split is habit rather than capability: both read your files from a desktop app, both handle long documents, and the one you will actually open every morning is the better buy. Against Google Gemini, the question is where your documents already live — if that is Gmail and Drive, Gemini starts one step ahead.
None of these run work while you are asleep. That is a different job, and it belongs to Make or Zapier.
Alternatives
Assistants & chatModelClaude
Anthropic's AI assistant, available in a browser tab and — the part that matters here — as a desktop app that can read the files on your own machine and reach the systems you connect to it.
Assistants & chatAppsGoogle Gemini
Google's assistant, usable on its own and also inside Gmail, Docs, Sheets and Drive, so it can draft and summarise against files you already keep in Google.
Microsoft Copilot
Microsoft's assistant inside Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams and Windows, able to draft, summarise and answer from the files and messages already in your Microsoft 365 tenant.
Assistants & chatAppsPerplexity
A research assistant that answers questions from live web sources and shows the citation for every claim, so you can click through and check it yourself.
Get ChatGPT
Buying the tool is not the hard part.
The ebook is about what to hand over, in what order, and how you find out when it goes wrong. One payment, no subscription.