How to use ChatGPT for my small business: check every seat

To use ChatGPT for your small business without overpaying, check every paid seat before 30 October. That is when Pro loses half its Codex and Work allowance. The check is one Sheet, one row per person, and about an afternoon of work: plan, rand cost, a month of actual use, and whether they hit a limit.

What changes on 30 October

OpenAI announced the changes at its DevDay event, and Stuff set them out with its own rand conversions:

• Plus costs R400 a month.
• Pro costs R1,840 a month. Its Codex and Work allowance drops from 20 times Plus's to 10 times. Its GPT-6 Pro messages drop from 200 a week to 100. Pro gains access to Dots, OpenAI's new always-on agents. Existing Pro subscribers keep their current limits until 29 October and get a one-time usage credit.
• Pro 500 is new, at $500 a month, which Stuff converts to R8,200. It promises "up to 8 times faster token generation" and "25 times the usage of Plus".

The changes apply to paying users from 30 October. The rand figures are Stuff's conversions of dollar prices. What lands on your card statement depends on the exchange rate and your bank. Check OpenAI's own pricing page on the day you do this.

Before you start

• The card statements. Last month's statement for every card that pays for ChatGPT, company and personal.
• A list of who uses it. Ask the team, not just finance. Some seats are on personal cards claimed back as expenses.
• One person who decides. The owner or the finance lead, so moves up and down are not a negotiation per seat.

Step 1: one row per paid seat

Open a Google Sheet. One row for every paid ChatGPT subscription you found on the statements. Columns: name, role, plan, card it is billed to.

If a statement line cannot be matched to a person, that is your first finding. Somebody is paying for a seat nobody has claimed.

Step 2: the rand cost

Add a column for the monthly cost in rands, taken from the actual statement line rather than the price list. That is the number that already includes the exchange rate and any bank fee.

Add a second column with the total for the year. Five Pro seats look different at twelve months than at one.

Step 3: a month of actual use

Ask each person to write down what they used ChatGPT for over the last month. Three or four lines: drafting quotes, checking contracts, writing code, summarising supplier statements.

Ask for roughly how often, too: daily, weekly, or a few times. Do not ask whether they "need" Pro. Everyone needs the tool they already have.

Step 4: did they hit a limit

Add one column: did this person hit a usage limit in the last month, and on roughly what date. Yes, no, or not sure.

This is the only column that justifies a more expensive plan. A person who uses ChatGPT every day but never hits a limit on Plus has no reason to be on Pro.

Step 5: mark what changes for each Pro seat

For every Pro seat, note what the person uses most. If it is Codex or Work, their allowance halves on 30 October. If it is chat with GPT-6 Pro, their weekly messages go from 200 to 100.

If they use neither heavily, the change may not touch them at all. If they want Dots, note that Pro includes them from 30 October.

Step 6: decide each row

Apply one rule. Move someone up a tier only when the Sheet shows they hit the limit. Move them down when it shows they never came close. Leave everyone else where they are.

Write the decision and the date in the last column. Pro 500 at about R8,200 a month should need a very clear row, with dated limits, before anyone signs for it.

Step 7: set a review date

Put a date in the Sheet for 30 November. By then everyone will have had a month on the new allowances. Repeat Step 4 only: who hit a limit. That is a ten-minute check.

What breaks here

Dollar billing on a South African company card. The price is set in dollars, so the rand cost moves with the exchange rate every month. The statement column in Step 2 is the only honest number, so update it each month you review.

Personal accounts. Staff paying on their own cards and claiming it back do not appear on the company statement. Some use free accounts for work. The Sheet cannot see either unless you ask, and it says nothing about what data went into them.

The limit nobody mentions. A person who hits a limit may just wait it out, or switch to a free tool, and never say so. Asking directly in Step 4 is the only way to find out.

Seat counting by job title. "Developers get Pro" is a policy that ignores the log. The log is cheaper.

When this stops being enough

A Sheet works for five or ten seats reviewed monthly. It stops working when the business has seats across ChatGPT, Copilot and Claude, some billed per seat and some by usage, and nobody can say what each person actually did with them.

At that point the business needs one workspace, signed in with work accounts, that reports usage per seat in rands. That is what Zorah sets up when it builds AI into a business's own workspace, with the usage feeding the same cost reporting the owner already reads.

On Monday, pull last month's card statements and count the ChatGPT lines. If the count does not match the number of people you think are paying, start the Sheet today.