OpenAI’s Custom GPT -> plugin migration raises access concerns

GPT builders Plugins / Actions builders
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1

I’m genuinely devastated by the way OpenAI is handling the retirement of Custom GPTs and the migration to plugins.

I’m a small independent creator. I’m not a large company with a development team behind me. Over a considerable period of time, I have built a small business around creative Custom GPT tools, investing hundreds of hours into designing, testing, improving and supporting them.

People have paid for access to these tools.

Now I’m being told that Custom GPTs are being retired, while the migrated personal plugins start as private and existing users do not automatically receive access.

My biggest question remains incredibly simple:

How are small creators supposed to provide continued access to customers who have already paid for our GPT-based products?

I have contacted Support repeatedly because I need a clear answer. These are real customers and a real small business. I cannot simply tell people who trusted me and paid me, “Sorry, the platform changed.”

What makes this particularly upsetting is that Custom GPTs made it possible for people without programming teams or large budgets to create genuinely useful products and experiences. The simplicity of building something and sharing it through a link was precisely what made the system so accessible.

The replacement needs to preserve that accessibility.

I have tried recreating one of my tools on another AI platform, and the experience was nowhere near what I had built within ChatGPT. I don’t want to leave OpenAI. I want the tools I have spent so long creating to have a future here.

But right now I feel that independent creators and small businesses who invested heavily in the Custom GPT ecosystem have been left with enormous uncertainty.

I know from reading this community that I am not the only creator concerned about this.

So I would really like OpenAI to address this directly:

Please give personal creators a straightforward way to share migrated plugins with customers — whether that is “Anyone with the link”, unlisted sharing, customer invitations, or another practical access system.

And please provide a clear transition route for existing customers before Custom GPTs are retired.

Small creators built businesses, teaching resources and communities around technology OpenAI encouraged us to create with.

We deserve clarity about how the people who already use those creations are supposed to continue accessing them.

If you’re another creator, educator or small business affected by this migration, I’d genuinely like to hear how you are dealing with it. Are you facing the same problem with existing users or customers?

2

Thanks, you’ve really hit the nail on the head!
Over the years, I’ve developed, maintained, and improved dozens—over a hundred—GPTs. Many of them are freely available to creatives—especially Midjourney users for prompt development—and there are also a great many GPTs that empower people to improve their rhetorical skills, recognize and debunk fake news, and respond cleverly.
GPTs have been an extremely accessible option for EVERYONE.
And now that’s just supposed to go away? I can’t even automatically publish a migrated GPT—apparently, I have to create it from scratch first and then specifically submit it for review.
That is definitely NOT user-friendly! And it basically goes against everything OpenAI has stood for as a company.
I’m afraid OpenAI won’t listen to its community this time, and that purely financial interests are ultimately driving this decision. Shame on you, OpenAI!

3

you’re contract with your clients should be hardened enough to give you cover for when a supplier upstream pull a product/service, I agree it sucks but this is generally how technology works in its early days, cast a 1000 seeds and see what sticks.

Maybe there are things like Gemini Gems that get people half the way to a custom GPT.

4

Yeah, this sucks. I have a membership where I’m mostly selling access to my CustomGPT’s. I have trainings, but those are basically walking people through how to use the CustomGPTs. I have no idea what I’m going to do. I also spent 3 weeks creating CustomGPTs for content creation for my own business so my wife could help me create content. Now I have recreate/migrate all of those things as well. This is such a pain. CustomGPT’s are PERFECT!!! Just freakin’ leave them alone.

5

I’m in the same boat and could not agree with you more! It is imperative that we get an answer to this because this is going to have a very negative effect on small businesses and solopreneurs. Today (9/23) my account is showing “Migrate to Plugin” options for my many Custom GPTs. I migrated one as a test, but see no way to share it with anyone other than my own account. I’m not interested in making public plugins that the world can find in the repository, I have many client-only developments that must remain private only to their owners. Please help us get some clarity, OpenAI!

6

I think ChatGPT Sites are another option for carrying a custom GPT business forward.

You can provide prompts and resources, and limit access to specific email addresses tied to ChatGPT accounts.

Because this is a recurring question I am open to questions and feedback.
Please note:
I am not an OpenAI employee and cannot change anything about custom GPTs being deprecated.

7

ChatGPT Sites looks like…a place to create web-sites. That’s it. Am I missing something here? OP is talking about the forced migration of Custom GPTs that they created, and are selling access to, over to Plugins, which apparently cannot be gated/shared the same way?

Can you please explain how your recommendation (ChatGPT Sites) relates to this discussion?

Thanks!

8

I’m on the other side of things: I create Custom GPTs for myself, private, never shared. But I feel like this forced migration from Custom GPTs - which I’ve been using since they were released, leveraging them every day - to Plugins was way too fast. We have a few months to migrate, then they’re done.

So far, I’ve migrated my Custom GPTs and already reported one issue with them, but I’m sure you’ve already experienced that the Plugin infrastructure and build system is completely different from Custom GPTs. Something entirely new to learn, a process to go through. Certainly not as simple as Custom GPTs were.

The Migrate to Plugins buttons literally just arrived in my account yesterday. That gives us, what, three months to migrate everything and get them working? Four, unshared Custom GPTs is workable, but what if you have hundreds?

Google does this with their free products all the time: people use a Google service for years…decades…and then the service just goes away with nothing to replace it.

Is OpenAI going to be doing this regularly? It’s concerning. Especially seeing as we pay for this service and I can’t see what the benefit is for anyone to migrate from Custom GPTs (which work great!) to Plugins (which have questionable value for me).

9

I run a small business in Brazil that delivers personalized custom GPTs to paying customers. Each customer uses her own ChatGPT account (Free or Plus) and opens her GPT through “Anyone with the link”. No workspace seats, no GPT Store listing, just a link. Today that is 47 GPTs and 25 active customers, most of whom subscribed to Plus specifically to use them.

With the retirement on Dec 11, the migration FAQ says the replacement plugin “starts private” and sharing settings do not carry over. The documented plugin sharing options are all inside the workspace (invited members, workspace link, workspace directory) or the public directory after review. When I asked support, the written answers were: (1) link access for people outside the workspace “does not exist today”; (2) there is no published review time for the public directory, and use by Free accounts “depends on plan, account, region and plugin capabilities”; (3) full MCP is Business/Enterprise/Edu only.

So the use case “customer pays me, I send a link, she uses it on her own account” has no documented successor. Public directory listing plus my own OAuth is a possible route, but it means every product built this way now depends on a review queue with no timeline, eleven weeks before the shutdown.

Questions for OpenAI and for other builders:

  1. Is an unlisted plugin, shareable by link to people outside the workspace, planned before Dec 11?
  2. Can Free and Plus accounts install and use directory plugins that have an MCP server?
  3. What review times are people seeing for directory submissions?

If you deliver GPTs to external customers by link, please add your case here. This is a large group (consultants, schools, coaches, small SaaS), and the migration currently has no path for it.

10

After some of my last posts I’ve been able to make it work.

  1. Caveat: You still need to create your Plugin.
    Use the OpenAI migration tool for your Custom GPT, (it’ll create something ugly, but that’s ok)
  2. Download your private-only plugin (it’ll download a zip).
  3. Use Codex or other vibe tool (if you don’t code yourself) to re-create a clean copy of the Plugin where skills are properly defined
  4. Zip your project and upload as a plugin for your workspace
  5. Copy the plugin identifier from the URL (asdk_app_…)
  6. Create a ChatGPT Project with memory set to Project only. Add in the instructions to use your plugin for all conversations
  7. Upload your reference files/add your instructions (minus anything you moved to a skill)
  8. Then you can use the “invite” option to share with external users/clients

NOTE: I purposely left out MCP but if you used actions before just switch to a MCP server, configure it in your ChatGPT workspace, and reference it in your plugin.

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The next bit is, after you invite your users, if you were using URL links for them, you can do that again to force plugin use.

Copy URL from project (https)://chatgpt.com/g/g-(project-identifier)/project?hints=plugin%3A(asdk_app_…)&prompt=(your default prompt, similar to conversation starters in Custom GPT)

That’s what I’m doing for now.

12

I recently migrated two of my Custom GPTs over to their new ‘Plugin’ architecture. I used them just a bit, and boom—15% of my usage allotment almost instantly vanished. What makes it even more messed up is if you’re like me and you built the models. We are being charged usage on what WE built because they know we rely on them now which is rediculous.

Looking at everything OpenAI has done lately, their true business model for the average consumer has become blindingly clear to meter everything that can be:

  1. The Trap: Get consumers locked into a monthly subscription plan.
  2. The Consolidation: Take features that used to be stable and predictable (like Custom GPTs) and force them into architectures designed for backend metering (Plugins).
  3. The Squeeze: Create an artificial environment of scarcity so that everything we do is nickel-and-dimed, eventually forcing us to either suffer through the wait times or, what they are banking on, consumers continuously pay more on top of our existing plans.

To fast-track this, their strategy is to break our will using the illusion of choice.

They will hide behind corporate legal speak and tell you: ‘Well, you didn’t have to use the higher reasoning model. You didn’t have to prioritize speed. Your plan guarantees you “access,” and how you choose to spend your compute is entirely up to you.’

They create the problem and then sell you the solution: ‘Ran out of quota? Don’t worry, you can always upgrade your plan or buy more usage! All the usage you want, for as far as your wallet will take you.’

The ultimate irony is their PR messaging about ‘trying to make it fair for everyone.’ If this was actually about fairness and server capacity, Why would we be able to just buy more usage? That wouldn’t be fair and that could be increasing the server capacity again right?

Long story short: They are systematically breaking down the platform’s core features to break our patience, baiting us into a never-ending paywall loop where we fall victim to a metered system over and over again."

13

I don’t think the question is about making it work. I think the real question is why are you or anyone else is having to make it work.

14

I blew through over 85% of my 5 hour and a cumulative 91% of my weekly, just trying to get one of my four plugins to do 80% of what it used to do…and I haven’t even gotten to work on the other three.

I used to be able to go in and add and remove files, but now I have to talk to an AI agent? And sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, and of course I’m burning tokens asking it to list files, realizing some of them are old and shouldn’t be there, so I ask if they can remove them, but they can’t…I ask for directions for how to remove them manually, and the answer is to export them to GitHub, remove the files, and then re-import the Plugin?

“Farce” is the word I’m looking for. Keystone Cops.

15

Same situation here, from Brazil: 47 custom GPTs delivered to paying customers on their own Free/Plus accounts through “Anyone with the link”, 25 of them active today. I asked support in writing whether the migrated plugin would offer link access for people outside the workspace; the answer, on Sept 23, was “does not exist today”, with no published review time for the public directory and no guarantee that Free accounts can use directory plugins. So the use case in your first post has no documented successor yet. I had opened a separate topic to collect cases like ours; the moderators merged it into this one, so this thread is now the single place for them. The ask is one thing: an unlisted plugin, shareable by link to people outside the workspace, before Dec 11. Please add your case here, with rough numbers (GPTs, customers, plans); the more concrete cases in one place, the easier it is for OpenAI to see the size of this group.

16

Thank you so much for posting this. I am in a very similar situation in the UK and have been raising this exact issue with OpenAI Support.

I run a small AI art business and have sold access to a large number of specialist Custom GPT tools, both individually and as part of bundles. Like you, I have been using the “anyone with the link” option to give legitimate paying customers access.

I have successfully tested migrating one of my GPTs to a plugin, so migration itself is not my main concern. The problem is what happens to our existing customers afterwards.

OpenAI Support has now confirmed to me that there is currently no documented mechanism for a personal plugin creator to individually grant migrated plugin access to specific external customers or automatically preserve the access permissions of the original Custom GPT.

However, they have also specifically told me that the absence of a currently documented mechanism should NOT be interpreted as confirmation that this functionality will never exist. They have logged my request as product feedback for a way to distribute migrated personal plugins to existing legitimate customers without requiring public availability.

That is exactly what we need — some equivalent of “anyone with the link”, an unlisted/private installation link, invite-only access, or another way of authorising our existing customers.

Making our plugins completely public is obviously not a suitable solution when customers have paid for these products.

I really hope more affected creators speak up about this before December 11. We aren’t asking OpenAI to preserve the entire old system — we simply need a supported migration path that allows us to continue honouring purchases already made by our customers.

Please keep updating this thread if you hear anything further. I will do the same. It is reassuring to know that I am not the only small business owner trying to get clarity on this.

17

Thank you so much for sharing this. Your situation is incredibly similar to mine, and it actually helps to know that other small businesses are facing exactly the same problem.

I have also contacted OpenAI Support repeatedly about this. My migration itself works — the problem is customer access after migration.

I have existing customers who legitimately purchased individual Muses and bundles from me and currently access them through their own ChatGPT accounts using the GPT links. Support has now confirmed to me that there is currently no documented mechanism for a personal plugin creator to individually grant migrated plugin access to specific external customers, and they have recorded my request for this functionality as product feedback.

Like you, what I need is actually very simple: an unlisted/private plugin that can be shared by link with existing customers outside my workspace, similar to “Anyone with the link” for Custom GPTs.

I completely agree that gathering our cases together is important. I will add mine to your topic too. Thank you for creating it — hopefully if enough creators explain the real-world impact, OpenAI will understand why a supported solution is needed before December 11.

18

Thank you. Two countries, the same written answer from support, and the same use case: paying customers on their own accounts, given access through “Anyone with the link”. Your reply adds two things this thread needed. First, that migration itself works (you tested it), so the gap is only access for existing customers. Second, that support logged it as product feedback and said the absence of a documented mechanism is not a “never”. That is the door to push on.

A suggestion so our requests add up instead of scattering: everyone here asks support to log the same product feedback, in the same words, and quotes this topic number. Something like: “an unlisted install link for a migrated plugin, usable by people outside the workspace on their own Free/Plus accounts, without directory listing, revocable per user”. No new system, just the equivalent of the option we already have today.

One more product observation: the migration banner in the GPT editor says “migrate yours so people can continue using them as plugins”. Right now the documented behaviour (plugin starts private, no external link) does not deliver what that sentence promises. That, in itself, is the case for the feature.

Two questions, if you can: did support say which team owns this or give any timeframe? And in your migrated plugin, did your Actions carry over or did you have to rebuild them? I will keep this thread updated with anything I hear.

19

Thank you, and welcome. Same use case, same written answer from support, same ask: an unlisted plugin, shareable by link with existing customers outside the workspace, no directory listing. My separate topic was merged into this one by the moderators, so this thread is now the single place for our cases; the suggested common wording for the product feedback is in my longer reply above. For anyone else reading who sells access to GPTs by link: please add your case here, with rough numbers (GPTs, customers, plans). Concrete cases in one place are what a product team can act on before Dec 11.

20

Thanks for sharing the response they gave you; that’s really concerning, and as everyone else is saying, a really tight deadline with essentially no guidance or documentation. Anybody know if there are other AI’s that offer something custom to Custom GPTs? Claude??

21

That’s my (limited) understanding of Sites. I saw a commercial for it on TV last night but really don’t understand what it does.