Is ChatGPT free?

Yes. There is a permanently free plan, it is priced at $0 on OpenAI’s own pricing page, and its headline is unlimited everyday text chats. OpenAI also prints what all four individual plans cost, in dollars, on a page anyone can read without an account. After the largest education app on either store published no price at all, that deserves to be said first. The interesting part is underneath. What the free plan actually includes is described in one word, “Limited”, seven times over, and since February 2026 the free plan has come in two versions with two different prices, neither of which is money.

Every price OpenAI publishes, and where

All of these were read at the source on 9 September 2026, on chatgpt.com/pricing, which is the only surface we found carrying any of them.

• Free — $0 a month. Priced explicitly rather than left blank, which is a small thing and a good one.
• Go — $8 a month. Derived: $96 a year.
• Plus — $20 a month. Derived: $240 a year.
• Pro — from $100 a month. The card says “From” and offers “5x or 20x more usage”, so the $100 is a floor rather than the price. Derived at the floor: $1,200 a year.
• Business — $20 per standard seat a month billed annually, $25 billed monthly, with a premium seat at $100 annually or $125 monthly, for teams of two to 200. Enterprise is custom, by contacting sales.

Two structural details sit in the pricing FAQ rather than on the cards. There is no annual plan for individuals — OpenAI 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. And nonprofits are offered up to a 75% discount on Business or Enterprise, through a sales conversation rather than a checkout.

Neither app store prints any of it. Apple’s listing for ChatGPT contains no dollar amount anywhere on the page — we searched the rendered text rather than trusting our eyes — and the phrase “In-App Purchase” appears exactly once, in the Information row, with the value “Yes”. The optional slot above the App Privacy panel where Apple will show a promoted purchase and its price is empty. Google Play shows an In-app purchases badge with no figure and has no In-game items and offers section, which is the equivalent slot we found filled in with fourteen prices on a free game. Both store descriptions are near-identical marketing copy that ends with links to the terms and the privacy policy, and neither names a plan, an amount or a renewal term.

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

Here is the free plan as OpenAI describes it on its own pricing card. One capability is unlimited: everyday text chats with GPT-5.6 Luna, with a footnote reading “Unlimited text chats subject to abuse guardrails.” The other seven lines all begin with the same word.

• Limited messages with uploads
• Limited and slower image generation
• Limited voice chats
• Limited deep research
• Limited memory and context
• Limited Codex access
• Limited ChatGPT Work access on desktop

The help center does not fill any of that in. OpenAI’s ChatGPT Free Tier FAQ says file uploads, image generation, voice, data analysis and other tools have separate usage limits, and then answers the question directly: “ChatGPT will notify you when you reach an applicable limit.” The limit is disclosed at the moment you hit it. The only hard figure on that page is 500 MB of Library storage.

It is worth putting that next to Duolingo’s free column, which has one check and five crosses. Both companies answer “what do I get for nothing” with a list rather than a number, and the ChatGPT list is longer and vaguer. This is not a rule broken. It is the reason the question in the title is harder than it looks: a plan can be free and still be impossible to compare with the one above it.

The exception, and it is the most useful thing on the pricing page. Four rows of the comparison table are real numbers, and they are the only quantified difference between paying and not paying that OpenAI publishes. The GPT Instant total context window is 27K on Free, 54K on Go and Plus, and 128K on Pro, which OpenAI translates into roughly 12, 40 and 250 pages of input text. Derived: the free window is about a fifth of Pro’s, and the page count is a gap of about twenty-one times. The reasoning-model window is 256K on Go and Plus and 400K on Pro — and on Free it is the one cell in the whole table that declines to answer, reading “Varies”.

The free tier has two prices and neither one is money

This is the finding, and it is new enough that most of what is written about ChatGPT pricing has not caught up with it. OpenAI’s help center article Ads in ChatGPT says the ads test began in the US on 9 February 2026, that ads may appear for users 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. If you are on Free and would rather not see ads, you can switch to an Ads-Free experience through Settings, Ads controls, “Change plan to go ad-free”, and a button reading “Reduce message limits”. OpenAI states the trade in its own words: no ads, lower usage limits and reduced feature access, with fewer messages and some tools such as image generation or deep research unavailable. And when you run out, the article says ChatGPT shows a banner offering two ways forward: upgrade to Plus or Pro, or “Show ads” to switch back to the ad-supported free plan for more access.

That is an unusually honest piece of product design and OpenAI deserves the credit for writing it down rather than burying it. It is also, read as a price list, a currency conversion with the rate left off. The ad-supported free plan costs you an unstated number of ads. The ads-free plan costs you an unstated number of messages. Neither figure appears in the article, on the pricing page or in the Free Tier FAQ, so a reader cannot work out which of the two free plans is the better deal for them, and cannot price either against the $8 that removes the question on Go — except that Go is one of the two plans where ads appear.

The rest of the article is the most detailed account of an advertising product this site has read on any listing or help page, and the specifics are worth having: ads sit below the end of a response and are labeled sponsored; they are not shown to accounts identified as belonging to under-18s; they do not appear in Temporary Chats, in the Atlas browser during the test, or near personal health, mental health or political content; and OpenAI says they 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. Compare that with the ad load on a free game, which no store and no publisher itemizes at all, and this is the good end of the spectrum.

The free plan’s card does not mention ads. The $8 one does

Read the two cards side by side and something does not line up. The Go card carries a line in small type: “This plan may include ads. Learn more”. The Free card carries no such line — its two footnotes are a link to billing help and the note about abuse guardrails — while the help center article behind that same “Learn more” says ads may appear for users on the Free and Go plans, and describes an Ads-Free control that only exists on Free.

We are not going to resolve it, because nothing either surface publishes would. The likely explanation is ordinary: the ads test is phased and regional, the free plan has a control for it and the paid one does not, and the disclosure was written for the plan where paying and still seeing ads is the surprising part. But the practical reading is the one to act on. The plan card that mentions ads is the plan you pay for, and the plan card that does not is the plan where the ads controls live. If you want to know your own status, Settings and then Ads controls is the only place that can tell you.

Two OpenAI pages, one free plan, a year apart

The same shape turns up on a date, and this one has a bigger number attached. OpenAI’s pricing FAQ answers the question about educational institutions by naming ChatGPT for Teachers, “a free plan for verified U.S. K–12 educators through June 2027”. The words “ChatGPT for Teachers” are a link. Follow it, and the page it goes to says free through June 2028 — in its hero, in a second banner, and twice more in its own FAQ, which adds that after that date OpenAI may introduce or adjust pricing and will give advance notice.

One free plan, two end dates, a year apart, on two pages linked to each other. This is the cost-side twin of the thing Duolingo does with its trial length, where the store listings say fourteen days and the marketing page says seven, and the resolution is the same: assume the earlier date, and check your own account before you build a school year of planning on it. The dedicated page is more specific and states 2028 four times, which is the version we would bet on. It is not the version the pricing FAQ will tell you.

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

The Teachers plan is worth its own section, because it is the best value anywhere in this pricing structure and almost nothing written about what ChatGPT costs mentions it. For verified U.S. K–12 educators it is free, and OpenAI’s own list of what it includes 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 setting that costs money elsewhere. OpenAI says that “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 currently 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 explicitly not for students. If you qualify, check this before paying for anything else — the same advice this site gave about the invitation-only app almost nobody writing about Calm’s price mentions.

The one thing $100 a month does not buy

The pricing table has a Privacy section, and the Privacy section has exactly one row. It is headed “Content is used to train our models”, and the entry under Free, Go, Plus and Pro is identical: “Opt-out available”. The $100-a-month column says what the $0 column says.

The help center explains why, and states the boundary plainly enough to quote. For services for individuals, “we may use your content to train our models”, with an opt-out through the privacy portal or the data controls. For business services, “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”, and organizations are opted out unless they explicitly opt in. OpenAI sells that as a feature: the Business card lists “No training on your business data by default” among what is included.

So the default flips at the boundary between personal and business, not at any price. A Business standard seat is $20 a month billed annually, the same headline figure as an individual Plus seat, and it arrives with the opposite default; billed monthly it is $25, and the minimum team size is two, so the cheapest way to buy the business default is derived at $40 a month for two seats on the annual plan.

That number is worth almost nothing to a normal reader, which is the point of printing it. Opting out as an individual is free and is one setting, so nobody is being charged for privacy here. What differs is which way the switch starts, and it starts the same way whether you pay nothing or $1,200 a year. Two caveats from the same article, both disclosed and both easy to miss: even after opting out, giving a response a thumbs up or thumbs down means the entire conversation attached to that feedback may be used for training, and Temporary Chat is the separate route that is never used for training and never written to history.

The price that is itemized

As on every page in this format, the money took nine sources and the data comes in a table. ChatGPT’s declarations are moderate, and one of them is unusual.

Apple’s App Privacy panel has no “Data Used to Track You” section at all — nothing is declared as used to track you across other companies’ apps and websites. Eight categories are listed as linked to your identity: health and fitness, location, contact info, user content, search history, identifiers, usage data and diagnostics. For scale, the same panel on Duolingo declares eight tracked and eleven linked, and on Calm three tracked and seven linked. An app about to show ads declaring no cross-app tracking is consistent with what the ads FAQ says the ad system uses, which is the current conversation and signals that stay inside ChatGPT.

Google Play’s data safety page declares device or other IDs as shared with other companies, and collects app activity and other user-generated content, crash logs and diagnostics, name, email address, address and phone number, approximate location, and other in-app messages. Data is encrypted in transit and there is a published route to request deletion. Google Play’s listing also carries a Contains ads badge where Apple’s does not, which is the first place the ads test shows up on a store page at all.

These panels are self-declarations, not audits, and two forms about the same app disagreeing is not new here — it is exactly what happened when one game declared “Data Not Collected” on one store and shared device IDs on the other. Sharing device identifiers is not the same thing as Apple’s definition of tracking, so this is not a flat contradiction. It is a reminder that the itemized data price is itemized by the developer.

What the terms say about leaving, and about staying away

OpenAI’s Terms of Use, effective 1 January 2026, answer the exit questions in three short clauses. Paid subscriptions renew automatically until you cancel, you can cancel at any time, and payments are non-refundable except where required by law. If you subscribed through the iPhone or Android app, the cancellation happens with Apple or Google rather than with OpenAI.

One clause is better than most and belongs on the credit side: OpenAI commits to at least 30 days’ notice of a subscription price increase, with the increase taking effect at your next renewal so that you can cancel first if you do not agree to it. Very few of the companies this site has read promise that in writing.

And one is the cost-side echo of something the reward-app pages deal with constantly. The terms say OpenAI may terminate an account that has been inactive for over a year where the account is not a paid one, with advance notice first. Free accounts have a dormancy rule and paid accounts do not, which is the same structure as a receipt app closing an account after three months or a maintenance fee charged against an idle balance. Nothing is confiscated here, because there is no balance to lose. What you would lose is the history.

One feature, two answers, and it is one you would pay for

A smaller discrepancy, published as unresolved because neither surface explains it. The pricing comparison table has a row headed “Create & share GPTs”, with a dash under Free and a check under Go, Plus and Pro. The Plus card lists “Projects, scheduled tasks, and custom GPTs” among the reasons to upgrade.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Free Tier FAQ, on the question “Can I create a GPT as a Free tier user?”, answers: “No. New GPT creation and publishing are not available on personal ChatGPT accounts, including Free, Go, Plus, and Pro.” It adds that existing GPTs can still be used, and that creation remains available in Business, Enterprise and Edu workspaces.

One page sells GPT creation as something $8 and $20 buy you. The other says it is not available on any personal account at any price. The likely explanation is a policy change that reached the help center and not the pricing table, and the help center article was updated more recently. Either way, if creating a GPT is your reason for upgrading, that is the one thing on the list worth confirming before you pay rather than after.

What ChatGPT does better than anything we make

This section is compulsory on every page in this format so that it cannot be quietly dropped when it is unflattering. Here it is not a contest, and the parts that matter are not the size.

• It publishes four prices on one page, with no account. That sounds like faint praise until you read the rest of this section: 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. OpenAI prints $0, $8, $20 and $100 in type large enough to read from across the room.
• The ads disclosure is the most complete this site has read. It names the start date, which plans are affected, where ads appear, what signals are used, what advertisers never receive, which topics are excluded, how to turn personalization off, and how long ads data is kept. Then it offers a free way to avoid ads and states the cost of choosing it. 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 included and no card required, is a more generous shape 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 whole catalog has no ratings worth quoting next to that.

How to check any of this yourself

Four habits, and the fourth is the one that did the work here. Read the company’s own pricing page first, and read the small type under the cards, because the disclosure that matters is usually in eleven-point gray. Check both store listings for the optional price slots — just above App Privacy on Apple, and In-game items and offers below the description on Google Play — remembering that an absence in either is evidence of nothing. Search the help center for the plan you are on, because the free tier’s real terms live there rather than on the page selling the paid one.

Fourth: when a company describes the same thing on two pages, open both and compare them word by word. Every finding on this page came out of that and none of it required an account. A free plan for teachers ends in June 2027 on one page and June 2028 on the page it links to. GPT creation is a checkmark on the pricing table and a flat no in the help center. Ads are disclosed on the card for the plan you pay for and not on the card for the plan where the ads controls live. None of those is hidden, and none of them is visible if you read one surface and stop — which is what almost everyone writing about app pricing does. It is the same habit the rest of this site uses on what reward apps actually pay, where the number a company will not divide is usually printed somewhere it never expected anyone to look.