OpenAI’s always-on agents are free, until one specific thing happens

OpenAI is pitching its new Dots as always-on agents that can keep working without eating into a user’s normal plan allowance, at least for the launch period. Thibault “Tibo” Sottiaux, who heads core products and platform, laid out the setup on X after a Community Note challenged whether OpenAI could really keep such agents inside existing subscriptions. His answer was blunt: the main Dot is included in the plan, available 24/7, and does not use the plan’s allowance when it works directly.

But there’s a catch, and it sits right at the handoff. If that Dot creates a task in Codex, the Codex work is charged the same way Codex usually is. The same goes if the work gets routed into ChatGPT. So a Dot can sit online all day and cost nothing extra, then start drawing down usage the moment it passes the job into another OpenAI product.

OpenAI says that free ride is only guaranteed for the first month after launch. After that, the company says it will publish per-plan usage terms. Sottiaux wrote as if the arrangement is permanent, saying the baseline functionality “will always just be included in your plan,” but the published terms are more cautious. That gap matters for anyone trying to build around Dots, because the meter may not stay where it is now.

The timing doesn’t make the story any simpler. Sottiaux said OpenAI expects “a few million dots online within days,” which means a lot of continuous background activity for the company to absorb. At the same time, OpenAI halved the included usage on its $200 Pro plan when Dots launched and added a $500 tier above it. And because a Dot can choose where to send work without someone checking each step, the path it takes can decide whether the user pays at all.

Sottiaux also teased a paid upgrade that would let users “increase the speed” and give their Dot “more bandwidth.” That keeps the base agent in the plan while turning better performance into an extra sale. It’s a neat OpenAI move: free until the workflow crosses into one of the metered rooms.