ChatGPT for PowerPoint's free period ends 6 August 2026: here's what enterprise teams need to know
ChatGPT for PowerPoint's free promotional period ends 6 August 2026. Enterprise and Business customers then move to token-based credit billing.
The free promotional period for ChatGPT for PowerPoint ends on 6 August 2026. From 7 August 2026, Business and Enterprise customers move to the same token-based credit billing that already applies to ChatGPT for Excel and ChatGPT for Sheets. If your organisation has been using the PowerPoint add-in without tracking consumption, now is the time to look at the numbers before the meter starts running.
What changed and when
OpenAI made ChatGPT for PowerPoint generally available for ChatGPT Business workspaces on 6 July 2026, alongside the start of Workspace Agent billing for other Office tools. PowerPoint was given a separate 31-day grace period, keeping it free through 6 August 2026.
This is worth noting because the billing timeline has two distinct phases. Workspace Agent billing went live on 6 July 2026, ending a free preview that had already been extended once from an earlier May deadline. The PowerPoint billing date was set separately, and OpenAI communicated the change through release notes rather than a dedicated announcement. Teams that stopped checking the release notes after seeing the original dates may have missed the update.
How the pricing actually works
ChatGPT for PowerPoint now uses the same token-based model as ChatGPT for Excel and Sheets, detailed in the ChatGPT rate card. There is no fixed credit cost per task. Instead, credit consumption depends on the mix of three components:
- Input tokens, the text, slide content, and source material you send to the model
- Cached input tokens, repeated context that OpenAI has already processed, billed at a significantly lower rate
- Output tokens, the text and content the model generates in response
OpenAI indicates that a typical GPT-5.5 PowerPoint task may consume somewhere between 20 and 110 credits. The range is wide because it reflects the genuine variation between a quick single-slide edit and a multi-step draft built from external source material. Output tokens cost around six times more than fresh input tokens, and prompt caching can cut costs tenfold, so the structure of your prompts and workflows matters more than it might appear at first glance.
What ChatGPT for PowerPoint actually does
For anyone who has not yet tried the add-in, it lives in a sidebar inside Microsoft PowerPoint. You can use it to create a first draft from source material, add or revise slides in an existing deck, ask questions about a presentation’s narrative structure, and tailor a deck for a specific audience. Connectors for Gmail, Outlook, and SharePoint allow it to pull context directly from those sources into the side panel.
Installation is straightforward: open Microsoft PowerPoint, select Home, select Add-ins, search for ChatGPT, and add the application. It then appears in the PowerPoint ribbon. Organisations that restrict access to the Microsoft Marketplace can have a Microsoft 365 administrator deploy and assign the add-in internally.
Workspace admins control which apps and sources users can connect, and for Business, Enterprise, and Edu tiers, inputs are not used to train OpenAI’s models by default.
What this means for your organisation
The practical question for most IT and finance teams is: how much have we been using this, and what will that cost from 7 August 2026?
Because the billing is variable rather than fixed, usage patterns matter. Larger decks, multi-step edits, and tasks that pull from connected sources will consume more credits than simple formatting requests. Admins should test the add-in with real templates and typical use cases before broad rollout, so credit consumption is predictable rather than a surprise at month end.
A few things worth doing before the billing date:
Audit current usage. Check the admin console for ChatGPT for PowerPoint activity across your workspace. Even during the free period, usage data should be visible.
Review your credit pool. ChatGPT for PowerPoint draws from the same shared workspace credit pool as other agentic tools. If Workspace Agents are already consuming credits from 6 July 2026, adding PowerPoint usage on top requires some forward planning.
Set governance policies. Workspace admins can control which apps and connected sources users can access. Restricting high-token-cost workflows to specific groups or use cases is a reasonable way to manage spend.
Communicate the change to users. Employees who have been using the add-in freely since July may not be aware that anything is changing. A brief internal note avoids confusion and sets expectations about responsible use.
The broader picture
OpenAI has compressed a significant amount of change into a short window. ChatGPT for PowerPoint reaching general availability, Workspace Agent billing going live, and now the PowerPoint billing date arriving, have all landed within roughly five weeks of each other. For enterprise teams, that is a governance moment, not just a product update. Credit budgets, admin policies, and user training all need to catch up with the product changes.
The ChatGPT for PowerPoint help page and the rate card are the two most useful references for getting ready. The rate card in particular is worth bookmarking, as it covers token pricing across all the Office add-ins in one place.