ChatGPT

For a solo founder, ChatGPT is the default second brain: you open it to think through a pricing change, draft a difficult email, summarise a long contract, turn rough notes into a proposal, or plan the week. What has changed the proposition is the agentic layer. ChatGPT Work can take a brief, go away and work across your files and connected apps, and come back with a finished document, spreadsheet or slide deck rather than a chat answer you still have to assemble yourself. Codex, included in the paid plans, handles the technical jobs a non-technical founder would otherwise pay for: fixing a landing page, writing a small script to clean a customer list, or automating a repetitive file task. Scheduled tasks let you set up recurring work — a Monday morning brief, a weekly competitor check, a monthly numbers summary — that runs without you remembering to ask. Custom GPTs let you bottle your own instructions, tone and reference files into a reusable assistant for, say, support replies or listing descriptions. Projects keep a client's or product's context in one place, and memory means you stop re-explaining your business every session. The honest limits are usage caps that bite hardest on the cheaper tiers, agent runs that still need checking before anything leaves the building, and the fact that it is a generalist: it will draft your support replies, but it is not a helpdesk, and it will plan a campaign, but it will not run your inbox end to end without supervision.

Free tier, a cheap Go tier, and Plus at $20/month as the realistic solo plan; Pro tiers at $100–$500/month are for very heavy agent and coding use.