Chances are half your office already uses ChatGPT, each person on their own account and in their own way. The question isn’t whether to use it any more, but how to use it as a company: which plan to buy, what it costs, what happens to your data and how to get the team using it well. This guide covers all four, with OpenAI’s pricing and terms as of October 2026.
The short answer
- ChatGPT Business is ChatGPT’s plan for teams (it used to be called ChatGPT Team). It gives your company its own workspace, central admin, single sign-on (SSO) and connectors to Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack and other tools.
- Price: a Standard seat costs $25 per user per month billed monthly, or $20 billed annually. A Premium seat, with five times the usage, costs $125 or $100. On the euro version of the page, Standard shows €21/month and Premium €105/month. Minimum 2 seats, maximum 200.
- Business vs Plus: Plus is a personal account ($20/month) with no admin, no SSO, and by default your chats can be used to train models. Business doesn’t train on your company’s data and lets you sign a Data Processing Addendum (DPA) for GDPR.
- Business vs Enterprise: Enterprise (custom pricing) adds full EU data residency (storage and model processing in Europe), role-based access control, SCIM, compliance logs and dedicated support. Business is rolling out a choice of storage region, but it only covers where data is stored, not where it’s processed.
- Buying it is the easy part. What decides whether it pays off is the rollout: a usage policy, connectors set up with the right permissions and staff training, which is also a legal duty under Article 4 of the EU AI Act.
What is ChatGPT Business?
ChatGPT Business is the self-serve company version of ChatGPT: you create a workspace, buy seats by card and invite your team, without talking to sales. OpenAI renamed ChatGPT Team to ChatGPT Business on 29 August 2025. The rename itself didn’t change the plan; pricing and seat changes came later.
Everyone keeps using ChatGPT as usual, but inside a company workspace: one bill, an admin who decides who gets in and which tools are connected, and conversations covered by OpenAI’s business terms rather than its consumer terms.
It includes ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work (the agent mode for longer tasks on desktop, web and mobile; in the desktop app it can also work with local files and desktop apps if your admin allows it) and Codex (the coding agent), plus shared projects, plugins, company knowledge, connectors, deep research and image generation. Custom GPTs still work for now, but OpenAI retires them on 11 December 2026 and is moving them to plugins.
How much does ChatGPT Business cost? Every plan compared
These are ChatGPT’s plans in October 2026, from OpenAI’s pricing page and help centre:
| Plan | Price | Who it’s for | Used for training? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Free | Personal use | Yes, unless you opt out |
| Go | Low cost (check the pricing page for your country); may include ads | Personal use | Same as Free |
| Plus | $20/month, monthly billing only | Heavy personal use | Same as Free |
| Pro | $100, $200 or $500/month, monthly billing only | Very heavy individual users | Same as Free |
| Business, Standard seat | $25/user/month (monthly) or $20 (annual). In euros: €21/month | Teams of 2 to 200 | No, by default |
| Business, Premium seat | $125/user/month (monthly) or $100 (annual). In euros: €105/month | Team members who use it all day | No, by default |
| Enterprise | Custom (per seat, credit-based or token-based) | Large or regulated organisations | No, by default |
| Edu | University pricing | Universities | No, by default |
What matters when you budget:
- Two seats minimum. You can’t buy Business for one person. Two Standard, two Premium or one of each all count.
- Mix seat types. Most teams give Standard to almost everyone and Premium only to heavy users.
- Local prices vary. OpenAI says pricing may vary by country and currency. Check at checkout whether a euro price is for annual billing and how VAT applies.
- Need more usage? Buy credits on top of the included limits, with spend controls.
- The API isn’t included. If you also want to build an agent or automation on OpenAI’s models, that’s billed separately.
- Non-profits: OpenAI offers up to 75% off Business or Enterprise.
Example: a team of 10 on Standard seats, billed annually, is $20 × 10 × 12 = $2,400 a year. Billed monthly, it’s $250 a month.
What does ChatGPT Business include that a personal account doesn’t?
- No training on your data. OpenAI doesn’t train its models on workspace data, including what ChatGPT reads from connected apps.
- An admin console. Add and remove users, bulk member management, admin roles, domain verification and usage analytics.
- Company sign-in. SAML SSO and MFA: people log in with their work account, and when someone leaves you cut off access in one place.
- Connectors (apps). Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, GitHub and more, so ChatGPT can search your email, documents and calendar. Read the risks section before switching them on.
- Company knowledge and shared projects, so a team works from the same documents and instructions.
- Plugins shared with the team: reusable instructions, reference files and connected apps for specific jobs (answering quote requests, reviewing contracts, drafting proposals). They replace custom GPTs, which OpenAI retires on 11 December 2026. Existing GPTs can be migrated to plugins, but custom actions don’t carry over.
- Workspace agents and scheduled tasks for recurring workflows.
- Audited security. SOC 2 Type 2, encryption in transit and at rest.
- Admin-controlled retention. Deleted conversations are removed from OpenAI’s systems within 30 days, unless the law requires otherwise.
ChatGPT Business vs Plus: which should you pick?
| ChatGPT Plus | ChatGPT Business (Standard) | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $20/month per person | $25/month, or $20 billed annually |
| Users | 1 (personal account) | 2 to 200 |
| Trains on your data | Yes by default, you can opt out | No by default |
| Data Processing Addendum (DPA) | No | Yes, via OpenAI’s form |
| Central admin and one bill | No | Yes |
| Company SSO | No | Yes (SAML SSO and MFA) |
| Connectors to internal tools | Yes, on the personal account | Yes, managed by the admin |
| Share plugins with the team | No | Yes |
| When someone leaves | The account and history are theirs | The company removes their access |
Plus makes sense if you’re a freelancer, work alone and don’t handle clients’ personal data. Business makes sense as soon as two people use ChatGPT for work with company data. For $5 more per person per month (or the same price billed annually) you get the contract, the control, and the knowledge stays with the company.
ChatGPT Business vs Enterprise
Enterprise is bought through OpenAI’s sales team and priced per deal. What it adds over Business:
- Data residency in ten regions, including Europe (EEA and Switzerland), at no extra cost, plus in-region model inference in Europe for eligible customers.
- Role-based access control, per-role permissions for plugins and apps, and SCIM (automatic user provisioning from your directory).
- Enterprise Key Management (EKM), IP allowlisting and a Compliance API to audit usage.
- Custom retention policies, a larger context window, priority support, SLAs and invoice billing.
- ISO 27001, 27017, 27018 and 27701 certifications listed for the plan.
For a small or mid-sized business, Business is usually enough. Enterprise starts to make sense above 200 users, when you need data to stay in Europe by contract or because your clients demand it, or when a compliance team requires full audit trails.
ChatGPT Business and GDPR
You can use ChatGPT Business in line with GDPR, but it doesn’t come ready-made. What you get:
- A Data Processing Addendum (DPA). OpenAI signs a DPA for Business, Enterprise and the API. It isn’t automatic: you fill in OpenAI’s DPA form.
- No training by default and admin-controlled retention.
What Business doesn’t give you:
- Full EU data residency. OpenAI is gradually rolling out a choice of storage region for Business, picked at checkout, but it isn’t available to every customer yet and it only covers where content is stored. It doesn’t cover where the model processes your requests, and if you choose a region outside the US, OpenAI still keeps a copy of every prompt and response in the US for a limited time for abuse monitoring. Storage and processing in Europe needs Enterprise, Edu or the API. On Business, your data may be processed outside the European Economic Area, usually under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework or standard contractual clauses.
- Self-service data export. OpenAI’s help centre says it isn’t available in Business workspaces. Worth knowing if you ever switch tools.
And what’s on you, on any plan: adding AI to your record of processing activities, deciding which personal data can go in and which can’t, telling staff who can see what in the workspace and, if the AI handles sensitive data or makes decisions about people, running a data protection impact assessment.
If your clients or your sector require data to stay in Europe, read our guide to EU data residency for AI models under GDPR: it covers what each provider offers and how we set it up for European clients.
How to roll out ChatGPT in your company, step by step
This is the real question behind “how do I use ChatGPT in my business”. Here’s the order that works:
1. Find out what’s already being used
Ask (without blame) who uses ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or other tools, on which account and for what. It shows you where the risk is and which use cases already work.
2. Write a one-page usage policy
- Company accounts only for work.
- What never goes in: health data, ID documents, passwords, clients’ bank details, third parties’ confidential information.
- A person reviews everything that leaves the company: client emails, proposals, contracts, posts.
- Who decides which connectors and plugins get switched on.
3. Set up the workspace and accounts
Verify your domain, turn on SSO if you’re on Google or Microsoft, sign the DPA and set retention. Decide who gets a Premium seat. If someone has useful history on a personal account, OpenAI lets them merge it into the Business workspace, but check what gets migrated first.
4. Set up connectors with minimum permissions
Switch on only the ones you’ll use in the first few weeks and check what each one can read and do. Start read-only; actions (sending emails, creating events) can come later.
5. Train the team, first together, then by department
One shared session on how AI works, how to ask for results rather than questions, how to check its answers and what the policy says. Then one session per department, on their own tasks.
6. Start with 3–4 use cases per department and measure
Pick concrete, repetitive tasks, measure how long they took before and after, and turn the ones that work into plugins or shared projects so everyone does them the same way.
Use cases by department
| Department | Concrete use cases |
|---|---|
| Admin and finance | Checking invoices against orders, month-end summaries, drafting payment reminders |
| Sales | Proposals from templates, meeting summaries with next steps, researching a client before a call |
| Customer service | Draft replies in the company’s tone, ticket summaries, replies in several languages |
| HR | Job ads, onboarding guides, answering internal questions from the collective agreement and policies |
| Technical office | Analysing tender documents, comparing supplier quotes, drafting technical reports |
| Management | Weekly reports from data and email, meeting prep, a second opinion on decisions |
The risks of rolling out ChatGPT without a plan
Buying Business takes ten minutes. These are the problems we see when that’s all a company does:
- Shadow AI: personal accounts holding company data. If you don’t provide an official tool, people use their own. On Free, Go, Plus and Pro accounts, chats can be used for training unless each person opts out, there’s no data processing contract, and when someone leaves they take the history (contracts, clients, prices) with them.
- Connectors with access to everything, set up without thinking about permissions. In ChatGPT Business, apps are enabled by default, and controls apply to the whole workspace: per-role permissions only exist in Enterprise. Connect email or Google Drive without checking who can see what, and a folder shared by mistake in Drive shows up in ChatGPT’s answers. And an email or document with hidden instructions can try to manipulate the AI (known as prompt injection) if you’ve let it take actions.
- No usage policy. Nobody knows what data can go in, who reviews what goes out, or which plugins are “official”. Every department makes up its own rules, or none.
- No training, so people use ChatGPT like a search engine. They ask one-off questions, trust the first answer and give up when it gets something wrong. Confidently wrong answers (“hallucinations”) end up in front of a client or in a proposal.
- Article 4 of the AI Act. Since 2 February 2025, companies that use AI must take measures so their staff have the AI literacy they need, and national authorities can supervise it from August 2026. Handing out accounts with no training and no evidence is exactly what doesn’t comply. Our guide to Article 4 AI literacy for SMEs explains what it requires.
- Paying for seats nobody uses. Without concrete use cases, many licences sit idle within a few months.
A partner who has already rolled out AI across a whole office knows which connectors to open and which to keep closed, has a usage policy that’s been tested, trains each department on its real work and documents it all for Article 4. You skip learning by trial and error with your clients’ data.
Rolling out ChatGPT in your company? Tell us about it and we’ll plan it with you.
How we do it at Aitomatik
We help you choose the right tool for your case, whichever it is: ChatGPT Business, Claude, Gemini or a mix. If you’re weighing them up, start with our ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini comparison for business.
For a multi-company group in the Balearic Islands we rolled out AI across the whole office, department by department:
- We visited 8 departments and mapped 75 processes that AI or automation could improve.
- We helped them choose the tool. For them, most processes fitted Claude Cowork, so that’s what they chose.
- We connected AI to their ERP securely, through a read-only gateway inside their network: no open ports, everyone sees only what they already could, and credentials never leave the gateway.
- We trained the whole office: a general workshop including the usage policy, then a session per department on their real processes.
- Result: more than 1,600 hours a year freed up across the group.
With ChatGPT Business we do the same: inventory, policy, workspace and connector setup, AI training for your team department by department, and follow-up. And if you need ChatGPT to query your CRM or ERP without exposing credentials, we build the connector as a secure MCP server.
When is ChatGPT Business worth it, and when isn’t it?
It’s worth it if:
- Two or more people already use ChatGPT for work on personal accounts.
- You handle client or employee data and need a data processing contract.
- You’re on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 and want AI to work with your documents.
- You want plugins, projects and history to stay with the company when someone leaves.
It’s not what you need if:
- Your clients require data to be stored and processed only in Europe. Business can at most choose where data is stored, and keeps a temporary copy in the US. You need Enterprise, the API or another provider with EU residency.
- You want to automate a whole process (answering customers on WhatsApp, processing invoices): that’s a custom agent or automation built on the API, not a chat tool for staff.
- Nobody will own the rollout. Without a policy and training, you’ll pay for licences that don’t deliver.
Frequently asked questions
Is ChatGPT Business the same as ChatGPT Team? Yes. OpenAI renamed ChatGPT Team to ChatGPT Business on 29 August 2025. Existing Team workspaces became Business workspaces with nothing to migrate.
How much does a ChatGPT Business account cost? A Standard seat is $25 per user per month billed monthly, or $20 billed annually (€21/month on the euro page). Premium is $125 or $100 (€105/month). You need at least 2 seats.
What’s the difference between ChatGPT Business and Pro? Pro is a personal plan ($100, $200 or $500 a month) for one very heavy user, with no admin, SSO or DPA. Business is a company workspace. If someone on your team needs Pro-level usage, give them a Business Premium seat instead.
Is ChatGPT Business GDPR compliant? It can be used in line with GDPR: it doesn’t train on your data, you can sign a DPA and admins control retention. But it doesn’t offer full EU data residency: the storage region it’s rolling out doesn’t cover processing, and a temporary copy stays in the US (for that you need Enterprise). And the usage policy, records of processing and training are on you.
Can admins read employees’ chats? Each member has their own history and chooses what to share. What admins can access depends on the plan and settings, so check it in your workspace and spell out in your usage policy who can see what.
Does ChatGPT Business include the OpenAI API? No. ChatGPT Business and the API are billed separately. If you want an agent or automation on OpenAI’s models, the API is paid on top, by usage.
Want to roll out ChatGPT without the headaches?
We help you choose the tool, set it up with the right permissions and train your team department by department, with the Article 4 documentation included. See our AI and automation consulting service or book a free call.
OpenAI pricing and terms checked on its website in October 2026; they change often. This guide is for information only and isn’t legal advice. Last reviewed: 15 October 2026.
