Is ChatGPT free?

Yes. There is a permanently free plan, priced at $0 on OpenAI’s own pricing page, and all four individual plans are priced in dollars on a page anyone can read without an account. The largest education app on either store publishes no price at all, so that counts for something. The messier part is underneath: the free plan is described with one word, “Limited”, seven times over, and since February 2026 it has come in two versions with two different prices, neither of which is money.

Every price OpenAI publishes, and where

Read at the source on 9 September 2026, on chatgpt.com/pricing, the only surface carrying any of them. Annual figures are derived.

There is no annual plan for individuals. The pricing FAQ offers monthly plans for Go, Plus and Business and annual plans for Business and Enterprise only, so the discount for committing to a year exists on the business side of the line and not the consumer side.

Neither app store prints a price up front. Apple’s listing has no dollar amount in its rendered text, and the optional promoted purchase slot above App Privacy is empty. The Information row reading “In-App Purchases: Yes” does expand into a price list, which this page missed until 19 September 2026: ChatGPT Plus $19.99, ChatGPT Go $8.00, ChatGPT Pro 5x $100.00, ChatGPT Pro 20x $200.00 and four credit packs, matching OpenAI’s own page. Google Play shows an In-app purchases badge with no figure and no In-app items and offers section, checked again on 14 September 2026, which is the slot we found filled in with fourteen prices on a free game.

One “Unlimited”, seven “Limited”, and no numbers

The free card makes one thing unlimited: everyday text chats with GPT-5.6 Luna. Its footnote reads “Unlimited text chats subject to abuse guardrails.” The other seven lines all begin with Limited: messages with uploads, image generation (“and slower” on the card), voice chats, deep research, memory and context, Codex access, and ChatGPT Work access on desktop.

The Free Tier FAQ does not fill any of it in. It says uploads, image generation, voice and data analysis have separate usage limits, then: “ChatGPT will notify you when you reach an applicable limit.” The limit is disclosed when you hit it. The only hard figure on that page is 500 MB of Library storage. Duolingo’s free column answers “what do I get for nothing” the same way, with a list rather than a number, and this list is longer and vaguer.

The exception is the context window, the only quantified difference between paying and not paying that OpenAI publishes:

Derived: the free window is about a fifth of Pro’s, and the page count is a gap of about twenty-one times. “Varies” is the one cell in the whole table that declines to answer.

The free tier has two prices and neither one is money

OpenAI’s help center article Ads in ChatGPT says the ads test began in the US on 9 February 2026, that ads may appear on the Free and Go plans, and that Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts will not have them. Then it describes a second free plan.

Few companies would write that down, and OpenAI deserves the credit. Read as a price list, it is a currency conversion with the rate left off. Neither figure appears in the article, the pricing page or the Free Tier FAQ, so a reader cannot work out which free plan is the better deal, or price either against the $8 Go plan, which also shows ads.

The rest of the article is the most detailed account of an ad product we have read. Ads sit below the end of a response, labeled sponsored. They are not shown to accounts identified as under 18, in Temporary Chats, in the Atlas browser during the test, or near personal health, mental health or political content. OpenAI says ads do not influence answers, that advertisers never receive chats, chat history, memories, name, email, precise location or IP address, and that ads data is removed within 30 days of you clearing it. No store and no publisher itemizes a free game’s ad load at all.

Three things OpenAI says twice, differently

None of the three is resolvable from what OpenAI publishes, and each has an ordinary likely cause: a phased ads test, a date updated on one page, a policy change that reached the help center first. What to do is the same each time. For ads, Settings and then Ads controls is the only place that can tell you your status. For the Teachers plan, assume the earlier date, as with Duolingo’s trial that is fourteen days on the stores and seven on the marketing page. And if creating a GPT is your reason to upgrade, confirm it before you pay. Existing GPTs still work, and creation remains in Business, Enterprise and Edu.

The cheapest route to ChatGPT is free, and it is not the free tier

For verified U.S. K–12 educators, ChatGPT for Teachers is free. Its feature list reads like the paid tiers: unlimited access to the flagship model, file uploads, connectors and apps, voice mode, image generation, data analysis, web search, memory, deep research, shared projects, custom GPTs and admin controls. It also carries the privacy default that costs money elsewhere: “as with other Business customers, information shared with ChatGPT for Teachers is not used to train our models by default”.

Eligibility is teachers, staff, administrators and district leaders employed by an accredited U.S. K–12 school or district, verified through SheerID. A workspace is limited to your own district, and the plan is not for students. If you qualify, check this before paying for anything else, as with the invitation-only app almost nobody writing about Calm’s price mentions. After the end date, OpenAI says it may adjust pricing with advance notice.

The one thing $100 a month does not buy

The pricing table’s Privacy section has one row, “Content is used to train our models”, and it reads “Opt-out available” under Free, Go, Plus and Pro alike. The help center states the boundary: for individual services “we may use your content to train our models”, while “by default, we do not train on any inputs or outputs from our products for business users, including ChatGPT Business, ChatGPT Enterprise, and the API”. The Business card sells it as “No training on your business data by default”.

So the default flips between personal and business, not at any price. Derived, the cheapest way to buy the business default is $40 a month for two annual standard seats. Hardly anyone needs that figure, because opting out as an individual is free and is one setting. Two caveats from the same article: after opting out, a thumbs up or down on a response means the entire conversation attached to that feedback may be used for training, and Temporary Chat is never used for training and never written to history.

The price that is itemized

No cross-app tracking fits what the ads FAQ says the ad system uses: the current conversation and signals that stay inside ChatGPT. Sharing device identifiers is not the same as Apple’s definition of tracking, so the two panels do not flatly contradict each other. They are self-declarations, not audits, and one game declared “Data Not Collected” on one store and shared device IDs on the other.

What the terms say about leaving, and about staying away

The price-rise promise counts in OpenAI’s favor; very few companies put one in writing. The dormancy rule echoes a receipt app closing an account after three months and a maintenance fee charged against an idle balance, except that here there is no balance to lose. What you would lose is the history.

What ChatGPT does better than anything we make

• It publishes four prices on one page, with no account. The app that exists to tell you what your subscriptions cost would not name its own, and the biggest education app on either store publishes no figure at all.
• Its ads disclosure is the most complete we have seen: start date, affected plans, placement, signals used, what advertisers never receive, excluded topics, personalization controls and retention, plus a free way out with its cost stated. We run ads in every one of our reward apps and none of our listings explains the ad load in a fraction of that detail.
• It gives the product away to a group that needs it. Free for verified U.S. K–12 teachers and school staff, with the business privacy default and no card required, is more generous than anything we ship.
• It is one of the most-used consumer applications ever released. 4.8 across 10 million App Store ratings, 4.8 across 57.6 million Google Play reviews, over a billion downloads, Editors’ Choice, and number one on the free productivity chart in both stores. Our catalog has no ratings worth quoting next to that.

How to check any of this yourself

Read the company’s pricing page first, including the eleven-point gray under the cards. Check both store listings for the optional price slots: just above App Privacy on Apple, and below the description on Google Play, headed In-app items and offers on an app and In-game items and offers on a game. An empty slot is evidence of nothing. Search the help center for the plan you are on, because the free tier’s real terms live there.

Then, when a company describes the same thing on two pages, open both and compare them word by word. All three contradictions above came out of that, and none needed an account. We do the same on what reward apps actually pay.