Why is the "Teams" subscription inferior to the Plus subscription

ChatGPT
,
1

I have had a ChatGPT plus account basically since it became availible. I subsequently had the opportunity to utilise ChatGPT in a team context, so I upgraded the account to a “teams” account, and agreed to pay the extra $5 per month, as I expected there to be some benefits.

As it happens, there is absolutely zero benefits to having a team account, and there are a number of drawbacks which aren’t documented anywhere.

Firstly, a “Shared workspace” is nothing like what the name suggests. I imagine most people would think it’s like a group-chat where multiple people can talk to the AI at once, with the conversation tracked.
This isn’t at all what’s offered.

On top of this, it’s more expensive, and with ChatGPT-4o, there aren’t even any material benefits in terms of rate limits

The other serious problems are:-

  • You can no longer export your data
  • You’re not elligable for early access to the voice chat features of GhatGPT4o,
  • You’re not able to have the model train on your input. (I know most people don’t want this, if they’re wanting their conversations to remain confidential), but I do try to “work with” the AI when it does stupid things, by taking it through the process step-by-step. (I don’t know if this has ever been beneficial, but when I was using my Plus account, it seems as though the AI didn’t make the exact same mistakes again in the future. )
  • It’s impossible to downgrade / sidegrade from a Teams account to a Plus account
  • It’s impossible to contact OpenAI in any way. That’s kinda expected but the whole teams plan is kind of illogical, and it just seems as though it’s promoted to Plus account users, and then traps them.
  • Finally, every member of your “team” has the ability to invite anyone to the “shared workspace” which results in non-trivial costs being automatically charged to whoever set up the teams account.

I just want to go back to having a plus account, and I will pay for separate plus accounts for my team members.

2 Likes
2

The Teams plan is not necessarily inferior to the Plus plan.

One of the main benefits of the Teams plan is the higher availability of GPT-4, with double the interaction limit compared to the Plus plan.

Although there is a risk that other account holders can add new members, considering the relaxed interaction limits, $25 is not too high.

Direct conversation with GPT-4o is still under risk assessment by the red team, and Plus plan members do not have access to it either.

You mentioned that the $25 cost indicates it is an annual subscription and that you cannot revert to the Plus plan.
However, if the person who is paying (though I am not sure about your specific contract with them) removes you from the worksheet, you will revert to the free plan.

It’s true that conversation history cannot be transferred, but if you then resubscribe to the Plus plan, while you will lose the chat history, you will be able to switch back to the Plus plan.

3

Honestly, the cost isn’t really an issue. I’ve personally found the benefits of using ChatGPT and some speciffic GPTs in particular to have raised my own productivity by a factor of at least 3. Furthermore, I’ve found that diagnosing problems and learning new APIs and Frameworks to be a lot less painful with AI Assistance.

I’m trying to help others in my team (who are willing, which surprisingly isn’t many, most people don’t see or want the benefits) obtain similar results.

I suppose I’m just experiencing a bit of buyers remorse, given that I have put in a lot of time into (i guess it’s training) my own GPTs to work more effectively with me (i.e. cutting down on repeatitive intros, using more terse language when responding, and making sure it doesn’t generate code with obvious bugs in it the first time it answers) and I’m concerned that I’ll lose all this if I decide to stop using Teams.

On balance, (granted I didn’t do my homework, and assumed a lot), I think the name “Shared Workspace” is a bit like Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” in that it’s nothing at all like what the name implies. If I had known this prior to “upgrading” I would never have done it.

Also, the fact that it’s literally impossible to communicate with anyone (Human or AI) at OpenAI who can do anything is kind of frustrating.

Rather than just ranting about it, I guess what I’m wondering is whether it would be better to just cut my losses and sign up for another Plus account in my own name, and leave the teams plan solely for others in the company.

1 Like
4

I apologize for my hasty reply without fully considering your feelings.

Indeed, the Teams plan lacks collaboration features as a team.
Also, the lack of communication channels with OpenAI is a problem. With the Enterprise plan, you can get priority support, but…

Please disregard my previous reply and make the best choice for yourself.

5

With plus I hit caps all the time, since upgrade no caps yet and working almost 24/7 with AI with long code branches. I’m only using one seat if team.

2 Likes
6

That’s a reasonable point, however given the release of the GPT4o model, and it’s more liberal limits, this seems to be of questionable value. That being said, I really haven’t compared the two models much, the only comment I can make is that GPT4o is a LOT faster, and doesn’t crash as much. Maybe with less people using GPT4 it will be better behaved.

Either way, I still have Gemini 5.1 for those times :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

7

GPT4o free version though only allows less than 20 questions per x amount of time.

where plus gets a good amount of requests I think 50 / hour. and teams well I have yet to see a cap. not sure though it teams is cap per whole team account or per member of the team. The big difference is if you are a coder or someone that wants A 24/7 bot you need teams or enterprise where the rest are capped. not that waiting an hour to a few matters to some, but for someone who needs to work constant its important difference.

2 Likes
8

Thanks for the info regarding caps.

I’m reaching the point where having unrestricted access to ChatGPT is becoming an indispensable part of my workflow.

It’s nice to know that the Team account isn’t a downgrade from the plus account, and that there are significant benefits in terms of usage caps.
Previously, I needed to be strategic about which model I used to avoid hitting the GPT4 usage caps of the Plus account, and not needing to do that will be a huge benefit.

Thanks very much for your reply, it helps knowing that there are benefits to the team account, even if it’s just a means to increase my token count (or take advantage of tokens not used by other team members).

I can also imagine that once the interactive voice mode is ready for general availability, I’ll probably end up using more still.

What still shocks me is that most of my colleagues have seen how well it works, yet seem uninterested in using it. What’s troubling is that I’m losing sympathy for people who complain about a future where AI renders their job role obsolete, yet put absolutely zero effort into using it now to improve their own work.

1 Like
9

Exactly, voice now I drive to work discussing ideas with AI non stop. This is important as it allows me to work faster in my head on solutions when I have a system to bounce the ideas through for thought testing as I call it lol.

My goal is to get my kruel.ai system cloud secure in future to connect custom chatgpt to it for the ultimate AI experience.

It than fully scales with openai with unlimited memory and understanding.

So I need unlimited chat ability everywhere I am , phone , desktop, tablet.

Until you start to hit caps regularly the chatgpt plus is always a good start.

It’s too bad they don’t have professional a package between so that I don’t carry the extra seat. But was with it for me.

10

This is a HUGE security flaw.

11

I share in your disappointment for all these reasons, as well as my Team account’s inability to read or create XLSX, PDF, and PPTX files. Not sure if it’s just a temporary hiccup, or just the way Teams works.

Plus when I went to Teams from plus, the account lost all my data. I was given the option for them to migrate, and didn’t think of exporting my data to import it manually. So my bad. I know I should know better.

But the fact that I don’t know what happened to my old data is a problem for them, as it contained enough of my personal medical information to make it a HIPAA issue if they can’t prove that it didn’t end up someplace it wasn’t supposed to.

I’m going to keep my Team account, but the accounts that I paid for for my team members to join the Workspace will be closed, and I’ll pay for Plus accounts for them. We’ll manually collaborate, and wait till Teams is ready for Prime Time before I move them to it.

12

It’s a bit of a shame, I can’t say that I’m entirely thrilled with it either, but the plus side is that you do get a lot more “credits” or higher “caps” so you can work the model pretty hard without it putting you in the time-out corner.

I wouldn’t worry too much about “manually colaborating” with your team members on Plus, as the colaboration feature of Team accounts are pretty weak. Firstly, the “shared workspace” they speak of, when promoting the team accounts is really nowhere to be seen, it’s a bit like Tesla’s “Full Self Driving”. The only colaboration tool i’ve seen is the ability to share a link to one of your own chat-sessions, which provides team-members with a read-only view of that session. This is probably the worst possible implementation of this, as it’s not imediately aparent that your session is shared, and if you aren’t careful, you may disclose private or confidental information with those with whom you’ve shared the link by continuing a chat, and asking unrelated questions by mistake.

As for being able to open Office Documents, I don’t know that I’ve had this probmem. I will test it for you and post back wiht my results. At present, I know it has no trouble with .pdf documents, markdown or source code files.

I suppose the worst point in all of this is that it’s impossible to migrate back to a Plus account once you’ve converted your data to a team account.

One thing to note, is that when your team account is created, your original plus account remains untouched, UNTIL you migrate your data, which automatically closes the plus account and pro-rata refunds any credit you may have had on that account.

So unless you explicitly migrated your data, or actually closed your plus account, it may still be there, just under a different username or o-auth provider. It may still be attached to your current sign-on, but not be super-easy to find.

Unfordunately Open AI don’t really like speaking to their customers, so geting hold of anyone to even lodge a HIPPA claim would verge on the impossible. My suggestion would be to tag @openai or @sama on twitter and hope someone sees it.

13

It’s not so much a security flaw, as it is a potential infinite money glitch for OpenAI. Whilst I trust everyone on my team to not press the button that costs the company $500 each time, if it ever happens, I’ll have no hesitation in back-chaging the transaction on the credit card.

I’d imagine that in larger organisations, where the owner isn’t drectly involved in engineering, it would be very easy to sign up to this with a corporate credit card (usually your manager’s, cause i’ve never seen a company where engineering staff are given corporate cards) and any additional users are simply overlooked (and since they’re only renewable in 12 month blocks, by the time this has happened, it would be too late for anyone to do anything about, given not-so-open AI’s policy of making it impossible to contact a representative of their company.

14

Teams was obviously rolled out before it was ready.

I’m getting tired of asking it to do something (Analyze this file, create this as a…, etc.), it telling me it can’t, but then when I tell it it used to do that for me when my account was Plus, it says it will try… which it does, and sometimes actually does it. But other times it will say it’s doing it, but then I get an error. :wink: Just now I asked it if it could connect to one of my google accounts to analyze some data. It said it could not directly process or analyze uploaded files (!). It then gave me the steps to download the datafiles and analyze them myself.

I really wish I could just go back to my Plus account. If they are able to find it, I’m hoping they will just let me do that. I asked for my data to be migrated, and got a confirmation that my account was closed and I got a credit. But without the data having come over, it might still be there somewhere.

I’ve sent an email to customer support, and they’ve confirmed it has been received. Taking any bets on the over/under about how soon they’ll actually respond?

15

I was wondering about the same thing.
I know when the Team account was created, I stepped off the beaten track during the “Welcome Wizard” and found that it left my unmigrated Plus account in tact, however I was now paying for a Team (x2) subscription and my own Plus subscription. Given that I don’t have infinite money, I did what I thought was the sensible thing and migrated my Plus account to the Team account, without really doing any testing on the Team account.
The mistake I made was that I was fairly certain that the experience would at least not be worse than their cheaper option.

Just curious, how did you email customer support. Thedy make it so hard to find the address that I’ve not been able to yet. I’ve also tried asking ChatGPT for the support email address and it dodges that question by referring me here.

If this forum supports DMs or if you wouldn’t mind replying to this thread, could you please share that email adress with me.

16

I went from plus which i used on release to teams, Teams is just enterprise but per user from what I see. It has all the same workings as Enterprise. Its way better than Plus in that I have only ever capped once well processing code 19 hours a day through it. So my experience has been nothing but great. I suspect that when GPT4o fully releases teams will be the sweet spot for two way voice as voice now can cap pretty quick on plus. So if you are like me and want 24/7 operation its teams or enterprise.

17

Happy to publicly share the emails I included because I have to think there are lots of people who need support for the same problems I had.

To: support@openai.com
Cc: dsar@openai.com

And to make sure that my medical information being a HIPAA violation, I included:
Cc: privacy@openai.com, legal@openai.com

Other than a confirmation of receipt from support@openai.com, I have not heard from any of the other recipients that they will be helping me.

1 Like
18

I think the biggest downside is if you, for whatever reason, are not able to continue to pay for the monthly subscription you loose all your accounts data. Even if you re-subscribe after the 7 day grace period. The data is gone!

If your conversation history is dear to you, try to avoid the team account!