OpenAI's assistant, and the default most teams compare everything else against. That position is worth naming before any price is, because it changes what you are deciding: not whether this tool is good, but whether something else is enough better to be worth the switch.
The price is published, and it is not on the pricing page
OpenAI's pricing page did not serve us its plan figures, and the help article for ChatGPT Go sends the price question straight back to it: "Subscription prices can be found in the ChatGPT pricing page." The number is on a third document, the launch post for Go, which prints all three consumer tiers and marks the cheapest one as the US price.
That asterisk is the vendor's own and it is the reason the figure at the top of this profile carries the country with it. OpenAI states that Go pricing is localized in some markets, so the entry price is one number in the United States and an unstated number elsewhere. Compare it against a flat worldwide seat price and you are comparing two different kinds of thing.
The free tier is the one to read with the sentence printed beside it. OpenAI's word under its own usage heading is unlimited, applied to everyday text chats, and the line under the same heading adds that usage remains subject to abuse-prevention safeguards. Both are the vendor's, one line apart, and taking the first without the second would hand you a promise the page does not make.
One more thing that article settles before you compare anything: OpenAI says it does not support annual billing, or paying for several months in advance, on Go, Plus or Pro. Where a competitor prints a lower rate for paying a year up front, here there is no second number to convert.
Claude and Gemini are the comparisons most readers arrive wanting, and the category hub holds all three.