OpenAI has made ChatGPT scheduled tasks available to free accounts, according to updated help documentation from the company. The change lands alongside two more upgrades. First, task sharing arrives for every plan. Second, paid users can trigger prompts from activity in Gmail, Slack, or GitHub.
What free accounts get
For months, the Scheduled page lived behind a paywall. When OpenAI rolled it out in June, only paid plans got access. Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users created tasks from the new sidebar section.
In addition, free accounts get up to three active tasks. Each task can run once, or it can repeat daily. OpenAI gives free users flexible scheduling windows such as morning, afternoon, or night. Meanwhile, the company keeps hourly schedules and exact delivery times for paid plans.
Sharing tasks with other people
The second upgrade is social. OpenAI now lets users copy a share link from any eligible task. Anyone who opens that link can review the instructions. Then they schedule their own separate copy in their account. For example, a shared morning briefing lands in the recipient’s account as their own task.
The original task stays untouched, so changes to it do not update the shared link automatically. Sharing works across plans. A free user can hand a useful recipe to a friend or coworker. Think of a morning briefing, a delivery check, or a weekly summary. As a result, one well-built task can spread through a team without anyone rebuilding it from scratch.
Triggers for paid plans
The biggest addition targets subscribers. Through ChatGPT Work, paid users can now create event-triggered tasks that respond to supported activity in Gmail, Slack, and GitHub. A Gmail task reacts to new messages and can filter by sender or subject line. In fact, each trigger type maps to one specific kind of activity.
A Slack task watches channel messages once you add @ChatGPT to the channel. A GitHub task responds to pull request activity in an authorized repository. OpenAI caps these at 30 runs per hour. The daily ceiling is 720 across all event-triggered tasks combined. Free or Go accounts cannot create them.
OpenAI has been building toward this moment since January. That is when it first shipped scheduled tasks as a beta for paid users. Earlier this summer, OpenAI also expanded ChatGPT search with licensed Getty Images. By now the pattern should be clear: the free tier keeps absorbing features that once justified a subscription.
For now, the paywall still guards hourly precision and exact delivery times. It also keeps app-triggered automation behind a subscription. But the gap between free and paid just got noticeably smaller.
