From what I can find, September 11, OpenAI started talking about the fact they’re going to be retiring custom GPTs.

It’s going to impact everyone, but it’s going to impact those with consumer licenses the most. That means those of us paying $20/month or $100/month, on either a Plus or a Pro subscription.

If you’re on a Business, Enterprise, or Edu plan, your custom GPTs are going away, but you might have seen a button or option to “migrate to a Plugin.” However, it seems that isn’t necessarily going super smoothly. If you had custom actions in that custom GPT, OpenAI has this to say:

Helpful, isn’t it?

If you’re on a Plus or Pro plan and have custom GPTs you’ve relied on, they’re just…going away. There’s no migration option. The best you have is recreating what the custom GPT does in a ChatGPT Project. Custom Plugins aren’t available on consumer plans, just like Sites and Dots aren’t available on consumer plans.

As I was looking into all of this, I saw a thread of people writing notes to OpenAI ask them to reconsider the decision to keep the Plugins away from consumer plans (or hoping someone who could influence decisions on feature access from OpenAI would read them). Within those, there were explanations of the difficulties of recreating the functionality in a ChatGPT Project. Possible, but painful.

So, if you’re on a consumer subscription, you’re stuck without access to newly released features like Sites, Dots, and now, Plugins - essentially, anything dealing with automation beyond what you can achieve with ChatGPT Work, which, from my experimentation, is a fair amount, but involves giving access to a folder on your hard drive to work within and from.

If you’re unfamiliar with the K-shaped adoption curve idea, it’s this: on one side, you have a group who adopts the technology quickly and grows rapidly, but on the other side is a group that lags behind, either because they reject the technology or are economically displaced by it.

In this case, the upwards part of the K is taken by those with one of two things:

Those with consumer subscriptions were on that upwards part of the K, but, at least with OpenAI right now, are being shifted to the downwards line, with advanced features increasingly out of reach unless you shift to a different subscription.

And the economics here isn’t something to brush off. If you’re on a Plus plan, you’re paying $20/month. If you’re a freelancer, you may be on the monthly payment plan because your work ebbs and flows, and you might need the flexibility of cancelling that subscription if an ebb lasts longer than expected. If you want to move to a Business plan, it’s listed as “$20/month,” but the fine print is that’s for one seat, but the minimum required is two seats, AND that $20/month/seat is only if you pay for a full year up front. Otherwise, it’s $25/month - per seat with a minimum of two seats. So you aren’t looking at moving from $20/month to $40/month, you’re looking either at a jump to $50/month or going from $20/month to $480/year.

...in this economy?

If you have custom GPTs, you need to ask:

If the answer is super-embedded, high-risk, or TONS of time, then it might be worth exploring if you can recreate the functionality in a Project, in Work, or use Codex to recreate that same system.

If it’s anything less than that, it might be time to let it go.

Or, it might be time to move learn how to create those systems in Claude.