ChatGPT review (2026): pricing, features and who it's for

What the five plans cost

Free is $0. Go is $8 a month. Plus is $20. Pro starts at $100 a month, with a higher $200 tier above it. Those are the personal plans, and OpenAI does not offer annual billing on any of them. You pay monthly and cancel when you like (as of August 2026).

The shop plan is Business at $20 per user a month on a year deal, or $25 per user month to month, with a two user minimum. Enterprise is quote only.

Do the arithmetic before you pick. Three office people on Business costs $60 a month on the year deal, which is the same as three separate Plus seats, except the year deal locks you in. Month to month, Business runs $75 for those three, or $15 more than three Plus seats. Business buys you shared work and admin control, not a discount.

There is no free trial of a paid plan. The free plan is the trial and it never expires. One thing to know before you put your crew on it: OpenAI says ads may appear on the Free tier in certain countries, and that it may test ads on Go.

The office paperwork it does well

Writing is the part that pays for itself. Every plan, free included, gets unlimited text chats. Give it your notes from a walkthrough and it will come back with a quote, a follow-up email, a "sorry we missed you" text or a reply to a bad Google review. Ad copy and service page drafts too.

Treat what comes back as a first draft you sign. Keep the pricing under your own hand, because the tool has no idea what your labour costs or what your supplier charged you this week. The pattern that works is a fixed format you have taught it once, then job details pasted in each time.

It reads the words in a manual and drops the pictures

This is the limit that matters most to a trade shop, and it comes straight off OpenAI's file uploads help page. Enterprise supports visual retrieval for PDFs. Every other plan extracts the digital text from your file and discards any images.

Think about what an equipment manual is made of. Wiring diagrams. Exploded parts views. A charging chart. A sequence of operation drawing. On Free, Go, Plus, Pro and Business, all of that is thrown away before the tool ever sees your question. You get an answer built from the words alone, delivered with the same confidence as any other answer.

Free users get 3 file uploads a day. Paid plans go up to 80 files per 3 hours at 512 MB each, and inside those limits the summarising and comparing is good work. If your document is text heavy, pulling the text out yourself first and pasting it in works fine. If your document is drawings, this is the wrong tool for it.

Photos, and talking to it from the truck

Point your phone at a nameplate, a burnt connector or a data plate and ask what you are looking at. It takes PNG, JPEG and non animated GIF, up to 20 MB per image, on web and mobile. Free access to this is capped.

OpenAI publishes its own warnings, and they are the ones that bite in a mechanical room. The tool may misread rotated or upside down text. It gives approximate counts of objects. It does worse with text in non Latin alphabets. A rusty nameplate shot at arm's length above your head is the hard case, not the easy one.

Hands-free is where ChatGPT beats the other two on paper. ChatGPT in CarPlay is available globally on all plans, it is built voice first, and there is a setting to start it automatically. That is an iPhone answer. No Android Auto support is documented anywhere. Voice time is budgeted per 24 hours: Free gets limited access, Go and Plus get up to an hour plus two more hours on a smaller model, and the $200 tier is unlimited.

It will agree with you when you are wrong

The failure worth understanding is not that the tool goes quiet. It answers inside whatever frame you hand it, at length, and sounds sure of itself. Feed it a bad assumption and it will build on the assumption.

That costs you twice. Once when a tech leans on it for a diagnosis. Again, and worse, when the homeowner leans on it and repeats the answer back to you at the kitchen table with a price attached. Service techs describing their own use land in the same place: decent on electrical and control troubleshooting when it is fed good information, poor on the intermittent faults a person finds by hand.

Check the support before you commit a crew to it. OpenAI's help channels are an AI chat and an automated phone line. Priority human support with a service agreement is Enterprise only, so on everything from Free to Business you have help articles and a bot.

Which plan to pick, and when free is enough

Buy Plus at $20 a month if you write more than a couple of quotes or follow-ups a week, you drive between jobs on an iPhone, and you want to talk to it on the CarPlay screen. Go at $8 is a fair step up from free if you mostly write and rarely upload anything.

Stay on free if your paperwork is a handful of texts and one quote a week. Three uploads a day is the wall you will hit, and you will know the moment you hit it.

Do not buy this one if your paperwork arrives as manuals full of diagrams. Below Enterprise it reads the words and drops the drawings, while Claude reads the visual parts of a PDF up to 100 pages on every plan including its free one. And if your shop already runs on Google Workspace, you are already paying for Gemini, so try that before you add another $20 a month.

We earn nothing on ChatGPT. OpenAI runs no affiliate program, so no version of this recommendation pays us a cent, which is a cleaner setup than most of what we cover.

What owners actually say