ChatGPT Work, launched in July at $20 per month, claims 20 million users compared to ChatGPT's billion — and costs OpenAI three times the price of the subscription in tokens.
OpenAI extends the logic of its agents far beyond code: ChatGPT Work, launched in July 2026 to $20 per month and built on Codex technology, targets non-technical trades. The adoption gap remains considerable — about 20 million users for desktop and mobile applications combined, compared to over 1 billion for ChatGPT.
The internal contrast is even more striking: 98% of OpenAI employees use Codex, compared with 17% of organizational subscribers and less than 1% of individual subscribers. The management defends the democratisation of the agent beyond engineers, with a simple commercial argument: an agentic session consumes much more chips, so earns more per user.
Three obstacles
Data access permission settings remain difficult to understand, and several functions exist only on the web, not on mobile. The evaluation of the result is also problematic: a code works or not, while the quality of a presentation, strategy or sales argument remains subjective. Finally the cost: four days of testing without particular intensity consumed 80 million chips, or about $65 for a 20 billed subscription. On the competitive front, Claude Code's conversational and iterative approach proved to be more effective than OpenAI's initially more autonomous strategy.
Read the full article on the original source
Go to the source →