ChatGPT Finances Opens to Free Users in the US

Finances is now on ChatGPT's Free and Go plans in the US, after spending the past several months as a paid-plan feature. Once you link your bank, card and investment accounts, you get a Finances page in ChatGPT that shows where your money is going, and ChatGPT answers questions about it using your own transactions. It works on the web and in the iOS and Android apps.

How it got here

Finances started on May 15 as a preview for Pro subscribers in the US. OpenAI said at the time that the goal was "making it available to everyone," and that more than 200 million people already come to ChatGPT every month for budgeting, investment questions and planning. Plus subscribers got it on June 25, along with Android support.

In September, OpenAI added credit scores for Plus and Pro subscribers, through a separate connection to the credit bureau Experian. The October 2 release for Free and Go users covers linking your financial accounts.

Connecting your accounts

You link accounts through Plaid, which OpenAI says reaches more than 12,000 financial institutions. Open Finances in the ChatGPT sidebar, select Get started, then Connect with Plaid, and sign in to the banks and cards you want to include. You can also type "@Finances, connect my accounts" into any chat. Syncing usually takes a few minutes, though OpenAI says it can occasionally take several hours.

After that, the Finances page fills in with widgets: spending by category, this month's spending against recent trends, upcoming payments, bills, net worth over time, and how your investments are split between stocks, bonds, cash and crypto. The subscriptions widget lists each active subscription with its amount, how often it charges and the next charge date. A widget shows up once ChatGPT has enough data to build it, and the pencil icon lets you reorder or hide them.

Asking it about your money

In any chat, typing /finances or @finances lets ChatGPT answer from your connected data. OpenAI's suggested questions include "What subscriptions am I paying for?", "Do I have any duplicate payments?" and "Am I on pace to stay within my grocery budget?" When it uses your account data, it may cite the transactions behind the answer.

You can also tell it things your bank doesn't know. Lines like "My rent is split with my partner" or "I'm saving up to buy a car early next year" get saved as financial memories, which you can view or delete from the Finances page. Accounts Plaid can't reach, like a private loan or a property, can go in the same way.

OpenAI's help page is upfront that the numbers can be off. Transfers, credit card payments and reimbursements sometimes get counted as spending, and "as always, AI can make mistakes." You can ask it which transactions it included and have it reclassify the wrong ones.

What it can't do

Finances can't take any action on your accounts. It can't move money, pay bills, change account settings, make trades, change retirement contributions, open or close accounts, or file your taxes. OpenAI says it isn't a fiduciary, a registered investment adviser or a tax preparer, and frames its answers as information for planning. At tax time it can help organize information and point out deductions or estimated payments to look into.

Privacy, and how to get out

Your finance chats follow the same model-training setting as the rest of your ChatGPT chats. On a personal account, OpenAI says it may use your content to train its models, so those chats can help train them unless you've turned off "Improve the model for everyone" under Settings, then Data controls. In a temporary chat, ChatGPT won't touch your connected accounts or save anything to memory.

To disconnect, go to Settings, then Apps, then Finances, or remove accounts one at a time from the Finances page. OpenAI says synced account data is deleted from its systems within 30 days, and Plaid deletes the data tied to that ChatGPT connection on the same timeline. Past conversations stay in your history until you delete them yourself, and any Plaid links you made for other apps are untouched.

Intuit shut down Mint, the free budgeting app, on March 23, 2024, leaving roughly 3.6 million users looking elsewhere. Intuit pointed them to Credit Karma, which, according to USA Today and CNBC, lacked the budgeting tools Mint users relied on. Plenty of them moved to paid apps that often run around $99 a year.

ChatGPT now fills that gap for free, for anyone in the US willing to let a chatbot read their transactions. My guess is the questions get more use than the charts, because typing "what bills are coming up?" into a chat you already use takes less effort than opening a budgeting app to go looking.

Sources

• OpenAI: ChatGPT release notes (October 2, 2026: Finances expands to Free and Go users)
• OpenAI Help Center: Finances in ChatGPT
• OpenAI: A new personal finance experience in ChatGPT
• OpenAI Help Center: How your data is used to improve model performance
• TechJournal: ChatGPT credit score tracking comes to US subscribers
• Mixed News: ChatGPT adds Experian credit scores for Plus and Pro
• USA Today: Mint app shut down, here's where users went next
• CNBC Select: Mint is gone, here are the best alternative budget apps