Image: The New Stack
Why it mattersA team planning a workload around a Dot does not yet know what the included allowance will look like after the first month ends.
The marketing line for OpenAI's new always-on Dot agent is that it runs 24/7 on your subscription. The actual contract is one month long.
The New Stack reports that OpenAI's head of core products and platform, Thibault Sottiaux, took to X on October 1 to explain how Dots usage works, after a Community Note challenged whether an always-on agent could sit inside existing plans without blowing past usage limits. In his post, Sottiaux wrote that each user's primary Dot is included in the plan, available 24/7, and uses none of the plan's allowance when it does work directly, according to the TNS story. The post is where Sottiaux's framing lives; OpenAI's published terms, as The New Stack also reports, are narrower.
The gap between the X post and the terms
The company says Dots usage will not count toward eligible plan allowances for the first month after launch and that it will publish per-plan usage terms afterward, according to The New Stack. Sottiaux described the baseline functionality as something that "will always just be included in your plan," but TNS points out the terms stop at the first month and that developers planning workloads around Dots therefore do not yet know what the included allowance will look like once that window closes.
Sottiaux also previewed a paid layer on top of the included Dot: "In the future you will be able to increase the speed and allow your dot to have more bandwidth," he wrote on X, according to the TNS report.
When a Dot stops being free
The split that matters, as reported by TNS: a Dot can sit online all day without touching your allowance, then start spending it the first time it opens a Codex task or hands work to ChatGPT Work. Both of those are treated as metered services, charged against their own plan limits. OpenAI also halved the included usage on its $200 Pro plan on the same day it launched Dots and added a $500 tier above it, TNS reports, so the allowance Codex draws against is a smaller target than before.
Sottiaux said OpenAI expects "a few million dots online within days," according to The New Stack, and the report notes that running agents at that scale costs OpenAI money even when they never call another product.
The useful question for a team is not whether the Dot itself is free in October, but which route it picks when it has a choice. A Dot can often finish the same job by doing the work itself, calling an included tool, or delegating to Codex, and the route decides whether the user is charged at all. Sottiaux did not say whether users will be warned before a Dot moves from included work into metered usage, TNS reports, which means a developer may not realise their allowance has been spent until they go check.
Source
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
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