custom GPT
By Saurav | Founder of saavos | Building in public toward $10k MRR
[!TLDR] A Custom GPT lives inside ChatGPT.com. Your visitors need a ChatGPT account to use it. An embedded chatbot lives on your website. Your visitors don't need anything. At $20/month, ChatGPT Plus unlocks Custom GPTs — but they cannot embed on your site. A dedicated embedded chatbot starts at $19/month and does exactly that. Same price, different jobs.
When ChatGPT launched Custom GPTs in late 2023, a lot of founders had the same reaction: I could just use this instead of paying for another tool.
Three years later, a meaningful chunk of the "custom GPT for my website" search queries are people who tried it, hit a wall, and are now figuring out what they actually need.
Here is an honest breakdown of what each option is, what it costs at every tier, and when each one actually fits.
A Custom GPT is a GPT configuration you save inside ChatGPT.com. You give it a name, a system prompt, and optionally a set of documents it should know about. When a user visits your Custom GPT link and opens a conversation, ChatGPT grounds its answers in those documents.
It lives at a URL like chatgpt.com/g/g-yourbot.
To use it, a visitor needs a ChatGPT account. If they don't have one, they hit a login wall. If they have a free account, they get limited access. Full access requires ChatGPT Plus.
You cannot embed it in an iframe on your website. You can link to it. It won't look like your brand. It won't inherit your site's nav or CSS or domain.
What Custom GPTs are actually good for: internal use cases where your whole team already uses ChatGPT. Technical documentation that your engineering team references daily. A support workflow where you want to copy-paste a link to a specific bot in Slack. Scenarios where you control who uses it and can guarantee they have accounts.
An embedded chatbot is a widget on your website. It loads via a script tag. Visitors interact with it without an account, without navigating away, and without knowing it's a third-party tool.
Most platforms in this category — including saavos, Chatbase, SiteGPT, and FastBots — work by crawling your URLs or ingesting your PDFs, storing the content as vector embeddings, and then retrieving the relevant chunks when a visitor asks a question. The AI model generates an answer grounded in your content.
The widget shows up in the corner of your site. The visitor types a question. They get an answer in 1-3 seconds. If the bot doesn't know, it says so and routes to email.
What embedded chatbots are actually good for: any public-facing FAQ deflection use case. Visitors who have never heard of ChatGPT. Mobile users who won't follow an external link. Support volume reduction on a real website.
Custom GPT route (ChatGPT Plus):
The $20/month entry is genuinely cheap. But you are buying a tool that lives inside ChatGPT.com, not on your website.
Embedded chatbot route:
All four embed on your site. None require a visitor account. Source: respective vendor pricing pages, May 2026.
The custom GPT lives on ChatGPT's domain. Your visitors have to go there.
For internal tools, that is fine. Everyone on your engineering team has a ChatGPT account.
For a website chatbot, it is a real conversion problem. Ahrefs' May 2026 data found that AI chatbot visitors convert at 23x the rate of organic visitors — but that assumes the chatbot is on your site, not three clicks away on a different domain.
A visitor who lands on your pricing page, has a question, and sees a "chat with our bot" button should not need to create an OpenAI account to get an answer.
That is the wall. And it is why most "I'll just use a Custom GPT" plans work for internal use cases but break for public-facing ones.
Three scenarios where ChatGPT Plus + Custom GPT is the right answer:
1. Your users are already ChatGPT users. If you are building a B2B dev tool and every person on your ICP is paying for ChatGPT Plus anyway, a Custom GPT that surfaces your documentation is a reasonable internal knowledge tool. Zero additional tooling cost if they already have the subscription.
2. Internal knowledge base. Your support team uses ChatGPT daily. You want them to have a shared bot trained on your product docs. Custom GPTs at $20/month cover this without any additional vendor.
3. You are prototyping. Custom GPTs are the fastest way to test whether your content grounds AI answers well at all. Before you spend $19-$39/month on an embedded chatbot, spending an afternoon building a Custom GPT on your actual documentation tells you if the answers are any good. Think of it as a free smoke test.
Three scenarios where the embedded chatbot is clearly the better choice:
1. Public-facing website traffic. Any scenario where visitors find you via search, ads, or social and land on a site they've never heard of. They will not create a ChatGPT account to ask a question about your pricing. A widget in the corner answers the question without friction.
2. You care about conversation logs on your own site. Embedded chatbot platforms give you access to the full conversation history: what visitors asked, what the bot said, where it fell short. Custom GPTs do not give the developer access to visitor conversations — only the visitor can see their own history.
3. Branding and trust signals. A chat widget on your domain, in your brand colors, with your company name in the header reads as part of your product. A link to chatgpt.com/g/yourbot reads as "this company doesn't have a real chatbot."
There is also CustomGPT.ai, which is a separate company from OpenAI — not affiliated. Their product is a managed RAG system with a business-oriented interface, API access, and enterprise features.
CustomGPT.ai Standard is $99/month monthly ($89/month annual). That is 5x the price of saavos Starter and 3x the price of Chatbase Hobby. For indie SaaS founders at $0-$1k MRR, there is no pricing tier in the CustomGPT.ai ladder that is competitive with the $19-$39 embedded chatbot market. The product is positioned at teams that need multi-user access, compliance features, and higher document limits — not at solo founders who need a widget on their site.
Pricing confirmed: customgpt.ai/pricing, 2026-05-19.
| Use case | Custom GPT (ChatGPT Plus, $20/mo) | Embedded chatbot ($19-$39/mo) |
|---|---|---|
| Works on your website without visitor login | No | Yes |
| Access to visitor conversation logs | No | Yes |
| Brand integration (colors, domain) | No | Yes |
| Internal team tool with ChatGPT accounts | Yes | Overkill |
| Prototype to test content quality | Yes | Slower |
| Multi-platform deploy (WhatsApp, Messenger) | No | Some (FastBots, Botsonic) |
| Grounded in your own content | Yes | Yes |
| Entry cost | $20/month | $19/month |
One row should settle the question for most people: "Works on your website without visitor login."
If the answer to that matters for your use case, the Custom GPT route does not solve it.
If you are a solo founder who wants to deflect FAQ traffic from your website: embedded chatbot, $19-$32/month. Train it on your pricing page and docs, paste the script tag, test it for a week.
If you want a quick smoke test before committing to a monthly payment: build a Custom GPT on ChatGPT Plus, train it on the same content, share the link with two people you trust. If the answers are coherent, the embedded version will be too.
If you need an internal knowledge tool for a team that already uses ChatGPT: Custom GPT is the right call. No additional vendor, no additional budget.
The products cost almost the same. The use cases are genuinely different.
Related reading: How to train ChatGPT on your website data (2026 guide) · AI chatbot pricing comparison 2026: what your $19 actually buys · Custom-trained chatbot under $50/mo: 4 honest options (2026)
I'm Saurav, building saavos in public. saavos embeds on your site via one script tag and trains on your URLs and PDFs — no ChatGPT account required for your visitors. saavos.com
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No. A Custom GPT lives on ChatGPT.com — visitors must have a ChatGPT account to interact with it. An embedded website chatbot (such as saavos, Chatbase, or SiteGPT) deploys via a script tag on your domain. Visitors interact with it directly, no account required. For any public-facing website FAQ use case, an embedded chatbot is the appropriate product.
Building Custom GPTs requires ChatGPT Plus at $20/month. There is no per-GPT charge on top of that. CustomGPT.ai (a separate company, not OpenAI) offers a managed RAG product starting at $99/month Standard ($89/month annual) — a distinct product category. For website-embedded chatbots that work without visitor logins, the comparable market is $19-$39/month: saavos ($19/month), Chatbase ($32/month annual), SiteGPT and FastBots ($39/month). All prices confirmed 2026-05-19.
No. CustomGPT.ai is an independent SaaS company, not affiliated with OpenAI. Their product is a managed RAG system with business features (API access, multi-user, compliance settings). CustomGPT.ai Standard starts at $99/month ($89/month annual); Premium is $499/month ($449/month annual). OpenAI Custom GPTs are a feature of ChatGPT.com, accessible with a ChatGPT Plus subscription at $20/month. Source: customgpt.ai/pricing, confirmed 2026-05-19.
The cheapest entry-paid embedded chatbot in 2026 is saavos Starter at $19/month, which includes 1,000 messages/month, Claude Sonnet 4.6, 2 bots, and a one-script-tag embed. A permanent free tier (50 messages/month) requires no credit card. Chatbase Hobby is $32/month annual with 500 message credits. SiteGPT and FastBots are $39/month. A Custom GPT on ChatGPT.com is $20/month but requires visitors to have a ChatGPT account — it does not embed on your site. Pricing from vendor pages, May 2026.
Three scenarios favor Custom GPTs: (1) internal tools where all users already have ChatGPT Plus — no additional vendor needed; (2) prototyping content quality before committing to a paid embedded chatbot platform; (3) B2B products where your ICP consists of technical users who already use ChatGPT daily. For public website traffic where visitors arrive without accounts, Custom GPTs fail at the login wall. An embedded chatbot is the right product for that use case.
No. OpenAI does not provide developers with access to visitor conversation logs for Custom GPTs — only the visitor can see their own history. Embedded chatbot platforms (saavos, Chatbase, SiteGPT, FastBots) give the account owner full access to all conversation logs, including what was asked, what the bot answered, and where it fell back. Conversation logs are one of the most useful signals for improving bot quality over time.
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