What ChatGPT Team gives a small business
ChatGPT Team and Business plans put OpenAI's models behind a shared workspace, with admin controls and a bill of roughly $25 to $30 per person each month. If everyone on the team uses AI hard, every day, that is straightforward value and the maths works in its favour.
The catch is in the shape of the plan, not the product. You pay per seat, up front, whether a given person used it or not.
Where the per-seat model pinches
Most small teams are not uniform. A couple of people lean on AI constantly, a few use it now and then, and someone signed up because they were told to. On a per-seat plan you pay a full price for each of them, so the light users quietly subsidise the heavy ones.
Here is the same twenty person team, billed both ways across a year. The seat plan does not care that half the office is away in July and December.
ChatGPT Business
$6,000
a year, 20 seats billed every month
| Month | Cost |
|---|---|
| January | $500 |
| February | $500 |
| March | $500 |
| April | $500 |
| May | $500 |
| June | $500 |
| July | $500 |
| August | $500 |
| September | $500 |
| October | $500 |
| November | $500 |
| December | $500 |
Drephos
$2,640
a year, based on actual usage
| Month | Cost |
|---|---|
| January | $240 |
| February | $280 |
| March | $310 |
| April | $260 |
| May | $290 |
| June | $220 |
| July | $40 |
| August | $150 |
| September | $270 |
| October | $300 |
| November | $260 |
| December | $20 |
These Drephos months are an illustration, not a quote. Real cost depends on usage. The key pattern is that a quiet month costs almost nothing and a busy month costs only what was used.
It also locks you to one provider. Some days the better answer is from Claude or Gemini, and a single-vendor plan cannot reach them.
What Drephos does differently
Drephos is one prepaid wallet the whole team draws from, with no seats to buy or count. You top up in USD packs, and credits come out only when someone runs a paid model. You get every major model rather than one company's, a single join link that you can lock to your company email domain, per-member monthly caps, and a per-member view of who spent what. Credits are valid a full year, refreshed on every top-up.
So a mixed team pays for its actual usage, not five identical seats. Nobody is billed for a month they sat out, and you can see exactly where the balance went.
When ChatGPT Team is the right call
To be fair about it: if your whole team is heavy, daily, per-person AI users and you are happy on OpenAI's models alone, a per-seat plan is simple and the fixed cost is easy to predict. Drephos earns its place when usage is mixed or light across the team, when you want more than one provider, or when you would rather not commit to a seat for every name on the payroll. If that sounds like you, the pricing page shows how the credits work.