Until recently the free version of ChatGPT stopped after a handful of messages. Then came the notice telling you to try again in a few hours. For a business that wants to get a quick text written between two appointments, that was useless.
On 6 August 2026 OpenAI removed that limit for text. If you pay nothing, you can now send as many messages as you like. The free tier also runs on a newer model.
What you can do with it
I will only name things I do myself or have seen at clients.
- Get the wording of a quote into shape. You type in your bullet points and have a friendly paragraph made out of them.
- Draft an awkward email. The third payment reminder, for example, the one that still has to stay polite.
- Answer an enquiry in a language you barely use any more.
- Pull the three points that actually matter out of a long email.
- Prepare the text for your own website before you send it to me.
The value is not that the AI writes better than you. The value is that it takes the blank page away. Having a first draft is half the work.
What is still capped
Free does not mean unlimited in everything. Images, file uploads and web search stay capped. If you need those every day, there is no way around a paid account.
What you should not type into it
This is where it gets serious, and this is where I see most of the mistakes in practice.
Do not put customer data into an AI service you have no data processing agreement with. So no full names with addresses, no invoices, no sick notes, no personnel files. That applies to the free account exactly as it does to the paid one.
The trick is simple: write down the task, not the person. Instead of "Write a payment reminder to Mr Müller, Bahnhofstraße 4, for invoice 2026-118 over EUR 1,240" you write "Write a polite second payment reminder for an unpaid invoice". You put the names and the figures in yourself afterwards. It takes ten seconds longer and saves you a lot of trouble.
And you still have to check
AI makes things up. Not out of malice, but because it builds sentences that sound plausible. With figures, deadlines, legal paragraphs and names, that is dangerous.
My rule: anything that ends up in your quote or your invoice, you read again yourself. Anything that turns into a legal or tax question, you put to a person who is allowed to answer it. I am not a tax adviser and not a lawyer, and ChatGPT is neither.
What I make of it
This is good news for small businesses. Getting started now costs nothing but your time. If you have held back so far because you did not want a subscription, that reason is gone.
If you want to know how to fit this into your working day without losing yourself in it, that is exactly what my AI setup is for. We sit down together for an hour, you show me the three most annoying jobs on your desk, and we look at which of them the AI really takes off your hands. And which it does not.
