On September 3, 2025, OpenAI announced a significant expansion of features for ChatGPT’s free tier, making advanced tools previously exclusive to paid plans accessible to all users. The update includes access to Projects, larger file upload limits, new customization options, and project-specific memory, aligning with OpenAI’s mission to democratize AI. These enhancements, detailed in a post by OpenAI on X, aim to improve organization, productivity, and personalization for students, researchers, and casual users alike.
Projects for All: The Projects feature, initially launched for paid subscribers, is now available to free-tier users. Projects act as smart workspaces, allowing users to group related chats, upload files, and set custom instructions to maintain context for long-term tasks like research or writing. Free users can create unlimited projects, with a limit of five file uploads per project, compared to 25 for Plus and 40 for Pro/Business/Enterprise users. This feature ensures ChatGPT stays on-topic, referencing only project-specific chats and files, making it ideal for tasks like creating an “AP Biology study guide” with attached PDFs.
Larger File Uploads: Free-tier users can now upload up to five files per project, a step up from previous restrictions, enabling analysis of documents, spreadsheets, or images. While paid tiers support more uploads (25 for Plus, 40 for Pro), this change allows free users to leverage GPT-4o’s multimodal capabilities for tasks like summarizing PDFs or analyzing charts, though with stricter rate limits.
Customization Tools: New customization options let users personalize projects with colors and icons, enhancing organization and navigation. This feature, available across all tiers, helps users visually distinguish projects, streamlining workflows for recurring tasks like weekly research or content drafting.
Project-Specific Memory: A standout addition is project-specific memory, which allows ChatGPT to reference previous chats and files within a project for contextually relevant responses. Unlike global memory, which personalizes responses based on user preferences, project-specific memory is isolated, ensuring external conversations don’t influence project interactions. This is particularly useful for sensitive or focused work, though it requires the Personal Memory setting to be enabled. Currently, this feature is limited to the ChatGPT website and Windows app, with mobile support planned soon.
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