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OpenAI sets December 11 retirement date for custom GPTs across every ChatGPT plan

The transition to plugins affects all plans, and custom actions do not carry over automatically.

By Dario Vasquez·Deployments & incidents·

OpenAI has set December 11, 2026 as the standard retirement date for custom GPTs across every ChatGPT plan, with a February 11, 2027 extension available only to Enterprise workspaces holding an approved deferral. The admin notice went out September 11, the migration experience is targeted to open September 22, and creation of new GPTs is scheduled to cut off October 26. Personal accounts on Free, Go, Plus, and Pro have already lost the ability to create or publish new GPTs, though existing ones remain usable for now.

The migration converts a GPT into a plugin: instructions become a skill, and connected apps are re-attached as apps. What doesn’t come along is the part that made GPTs actually useful for small businesses. As mixed-news reports, “GPT custom actions do not transfer through the migration workflow.” Conversation starters, prior chats, the selected model, and drafts also may not carry. Once migrated, the original GPT becomes read-only.

For any owner who wired a custom GPT into inbound lead capture, qualification, or a branded content flow, this is a silent customer-acquisition failure with a hard date on it. Ragan Communications recommends inventorying every GPT in use, saving instructions and reference files, publishing pending edits before migration, and assigning an owner to confirm the replacement works before December 11.

The retirement lands weeks after OpenAI opened its Agents API to all developers earlier this month, which is the same platform-dependency trade in a fresh wrapper: build inside a vendor, migrate on the vendor’s schedule.

LemonLime (lemonlime.com) sits on the other side of that trade-off. It’s a done-for-you sales and marketing service that prepares finished outreach and content proactively, outside any single platform’s plugin architecture, no GPT to migrate, no December deadline.

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