Free ChatGPT at Work: What It Costs You in Data, and When to Pay

Most people start using ChatGPT at work on the free plan, and many never move. For a €0 product the plan is generous. Whether it is fine for your work depends less on the price than on what you paste into it.

Everything below comes from OpenAI’s own pricing and help pages, read on 7 November 2026. Plans and prices change, so check them before you decide.

The plans side by side

What “free” costs in data

On personal plans the setting Improve the model for everyone is on by default, which lets OpenAI use your conversations to train its models. You can turn it off under Settings → Data controls, and the choice then applies to your account on web and mobile. Three details catch people out:

• ▸Feedback counts. Rating an answer with a thumbs up or down can send the whole conversation for training, even after you opt out.
• ▸Custom instructions count. What you write there is also used to improve the models unless you opt out, so keep client details out of it.
• ▸Opting out deletes nothing. Saved chats stay in history, in a personal account your company cannot see, export or delete when someone leaves.

Ads on Free and Go

OpenAI started testing ads in the United States on 9 February 2026 and is rolling them out to Free and Go users region by region. Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise have no ads. An ad appears below an answer and is picked using the current conversation; with ad personalisation on, past chats and memories can count too. OpenAI says conversations are not shared with advertisers, and personalised ads are not initially offered in the EEA.

For work, the ad itself is a small problem. What matters is that the text of a chat about a client becomes an input to an ad system, even one that stays inside OpenAI. A temporary chat shows no ads, and Free users can switch to an ad-free mode with lower limits.

When free is fine

• ▸Drafting and rewriting text that contains no names, figures or documents from clients.
• ▸Learning a topic, brainstorming, or checking how to phrase a public message.
• ▸Translating your own marketing copy or website text that is already public.
• ▸Code questions without keys, passwords or customer records in the snippet.

When to pay, and for which plan

• ▸Go (€8): more messages, uploads and memory. Ads may still appear, and the data terms are those of Free.
• ▸Plus (€23): no ads, stronger reasoning models, projects and custom GPTs. Still a personal account on personal terms.
• ▸Business (from €21 per user): the first plan written for company data. No training on business data by default, a data processing agreement, SAML SSO, and an admin who controls accounts and retention.
• ▸Confidential client files: a local model on your own hardware, behind a gateway that redacts and logs. See where client data goes and self-hosted AI.

An example: a six-person office

For a company in Croatia

When an AI service processes your clients’ personal data on your behalf, GDPR requires a contract with that processor (Article 28). The personal plans list none; Business, Enterprise and the API do. What a leak can cost a Croatian office is on our page about AI data leakage.