ChatGPT Sites Explained (Aug 2026): What It Is, Who Gets It, What It Costs

TL;DR. ChatGPT Sites lets you describe a web app in plain English and have ChatGPT build it, deploy it, and host it at a shareable URL — dashboards, trackers, internal tools, review workspaces. It launched June 2, 2026 for Business and Enterprise, and since July 9, 2026 it's in public beta on Plus and Pro too — included in the plan, no extra fee, with usage limits shown in-product. Free and Go don't get it. It's the same idea as Claude Artifacts, which is on every Claude plan including Free.

For two years, "ask AI to build me an app" meant copying code out of a chat window and figuring out where to host it yourself. OpenAI just closed that gap. At its June 2, 2026 "Intelligence at Work" event, it announced Sites — a Codex feature that builds a working web app and hosts it for you, returning a link your team can open and use. About five weeks later, on July 9, it opened Sites to individual Plus and Pro subscribers as a public beta.

Here's what's actually live as of August 2026, who can use it, what it costs, and how it stacks up against Codex and Claude Cowork.

What ChatGPT Sites actually is

Sites is not a new app or a new subscription. It's a capability inside ChatGPT — it debuted as part of Codex, OpenAI's agent for coding and everyday work, and now shows up as a "Sites" row on the ChatGPT pricing grid alongside Codex and Plugins.

The workflow is the part that's new. You describe what you want — "a dashboard that tracks our Q3 launch tasks," "an internal analytics portal," "a customer review workspace," "a knowledge base for onboarding" — and ChatGPT builds the full application, deploys it to OpenAI-managed hosting, and returns a shareable URL. Sharing ranges from owner-and-admins-only, through workspace members, to anyone on the internet; public sites can optionally require Sign in with ChatGPT for identity-aware features, and you can connect a domain you own (not yet in Enterprise workspaces).

OpenAI is positioning this as a work-product publishing surface, not a website builder in the Squarespace sense. The intended outputs are interactive and usable: dashboards, planners, project boards, galleries, scenario planners, lightweight internal tools — things a team opens, contributes to, and makes decisions in. Not static brochures.

It arrived alongside a broader Codex push: six role-specific plugins (OpenAI describes them as bundling 62 business apps and 110 automated skills) and expanded annotations that now work on documents, spreadsheets, and slides — not just code. The throughline is OpenAI repositioning Codex from a developer tool into something knowledge workers use. The company says more than 5 million people use Codex weekly, and that non-developers — analysts, marketers, operators, researchers — are about 20% of users and growing more than 3x as fast as developers.

Who gets it, and what it costs

This is the most important section for most people reading this. As of August 2026, per OpenAI's Sites documentation:

• ChatGPT Plus ($20/mo) and Pro (from $100/mo) — public beta since July 9, 2026. Plus and Pro users in the UK, EEA, and Switzerland were added on July 20, 2026.
• ChatGPT Business and Enterprise — available since the June launch (Business on by default; Enterprise via admin role-based access), plus public publishing.
• ChatGPT Edu — included in the July 9 rollout.
• ChatGPT Free ($0) and Go ($8/mo) — not available.

Price: nothing extra. Sites is included in the plan; there's no add-on fee. During the public beta, usage is capped at plan-specific limits that ChatGPT shows in-product and warns you about as you approach them — OpenAI doesn't publish those numbers on the pricing page. If you don't see Sites yet, it may still be rolling out to your account.

The guardrails

Because Sites publishes hosted, shareable apps, OpenAI put explicit limits in the terms:

• No payment-card data.
• No protected health information (PHI).
• No sites intended for users under 13.
• No malware distribution or impersonation.
• It's governed by separate ChatGPT Sites Terms, and it's a public beta — expect changes.

For anyone handling client PII, health data, or payments, the right read is: don't route sensitive workflows through a beta publishing feature, and check your organization's AI-use policy before publishing anything internal.

ChatGPT Sites vs Codex vs Claude Cowork

These three get conflated because they all live in the "AI that does the work for you" bucket. They're different tools with different access rules (verified against the OpenAI pricing page, OpenAI's Sites docs, and Anthropic's Cowork help center, August 24, 2026):

	ChatGPT Sites	Codex	Claude Cowork
What it is	Describe a web app; ChatGPT builds, deploys, and hosts it at a shareable URL	OpenAI's coding and work agent — terminal CLI, desktop app, IDE extension, and inside ChatGPT	Anthropic's agent for non-coding work: runs multi-step tasks on your files and apps, with plugins for your profession
Who gets it	Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, Edu (public beta); not Free or Go	Every ChatGPT plan — Free and Go get "limited" access on GPT-5.6 Terra; Plus and up get expanded usage and the Sol/Terra/Luna choice	Every paid Claude plan (Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise) on macOS and Windows desktop; web and mobile on Pro, Max, Team; not Free
Price	Included in the plan (Plus $20/mo, Pro from $100/mo); in-product usage limits	Included in the plan; Pro gives 5× or 20× more usage	Included in the plan (Pro $17–$20/mo, Max $100/$200)
Best for	Shipping a dashboard, tracker, or internal tool people can open at a link	Writing and reviewing code, or running agentic tasks across files and repos	Documents, spreadsheets, research, and file work you'd hand a capable assistant

If you're weighing Codex against Cowork as a daily workspace, that's its own decision: Codex vs Claude Cowork for Professionals. For what each Claude tier includes, see Claude pricing; for the ChatGPT ladder, ChatGPT pricing.

How it compares to Claude, Gemini, and Canvas

Sites isn't happening in a vacuum. "Let AI build me a shareable, interactive thing at a URL" is now a feature all three major vendors offer in some form — but the access models differ sharply.

• Claude Artifacts is the closest direct comparison. Anthropic added the ability to build and share AI-powered apps as Artifacts in 2025, and through 2026 added persistent storage (up to 20MB per artifact), MCP integrations, and "Live Artifacts" that refresh with current data. The key contrast: Artifacts is available on every plan, including Free. You click Publish and get a claude.ai link that anyone can open and use without an account. And the economics are notable — when someone uses your published app, their Claude subscription is billed for the usage, not yours. (On Team and Enterprise, sharing is internal-only.)
• ChatGPT Canvas is a different tool that sometimes gets confused with Sites. Canvas is an in-chat surface for editing documents and code side-by-side with the model — available on consumer tiers. It edits; Sites builds and hosts.
• OpenAI's Wix integration lets ChatGPT users spin up a marketing-style website through Wix's builder — a more traditional "make me a website" path that doesn't require Business/Enterprise.
• Google leans on Canvas-style and Gemini-app surfaces rather than a direct "deploy a hosted internal app" equivalent at this writing.

What this means for you right now

If you're on a ChatGPT Business or Enterprise team: Sites is worth a real look for the internal tools you'd otherwise never get engineering time for — a tracker, a dashboard, a review workspace. It's beta-stage, so treat it as a pilot, not production, and keep regulated data out.

If you're on Plus or Pro: You have Sites now. Try it on something small and shareable first — a project tracker or a one-page dashboard — and watch the in-product usage meter, since beta limits aren't published.

If you're on Free or Go: Sites isn't on your plan.

If you handle sensitive client data: The terms already rule out payments and PHI, and it's a beta. Wait for general availability and clear guidance before putting anything sensitive near it.

If you're just tracking where AI is going: Sites is a clear signal. The frontier is shifting from "AI writes you some code" to "AI ships you a running app." Whether you're paying OpenAI or Anthropic, that capability is becoming a standard part of the toolkit — and it's worth knowing what your plan does and doesn't include.

Sources

• OpenAI: Codex for every role, tool, and workflow
• OpenAI: Sites — build and share hosted sites in ChatGPT (docs) (checked August 24, 2026)
• OpenAI: ChatGPT pricing (checked August 24, 2026)
• OpenAI Developers on X: ChatGPT Sites now available to Plus and Pro in the UK, EEA, and Switzerland (July 20, 2026)
• Anthropic Help Center: Get started with Claude Cowork (checked August 24, 2026)
• Neowin: OpenAI brings Codex to ChatGPT and introduces shareable interactive Sites
• Digg: OpenAI launches Sites to turn Codex plain-text instructions into hosted, interactive web applications
• Anthropic: Build and share AI-powered apps with Claude
• Claude Help Center: Publishing and sharing artifacts