Where to Move Your Custom GPTs (Without Giving Away Your IP)
TL;DR
Custom GPTs are going away on December 11, 2026, and if you sold one, gave one away, or built your methodology into one, you have decisions to make. Wendy Breakstone and I cover what to back up first and where you can rebuild, plus why turning a paid GPT into a skill can hand over your IP.
When the news broke that custom GPTs are going away, one of my biz besties texted me right away. They're sunsetting custom GPTs, she said. What are you going to do? Are you going to issue refunds to the people who bought?
My answer was, whoa, no. I'm not going down that route. But I'd be lying if I said my stomach didn't drop, because the OfferMojo Squad, all seven of my agents, lives inside ChatGPT for the people who buy it. And the answer I got to in the end is calmer than the panic: back up everything inside your GPTs and pause selling them. Then decide where to rebuild, based on how much of your IP you're willing to hand over.
The timeline has been a little slippery. Even though OpenAI's help page says creation of new GPTs ends October 26, 2026, we caught wind of that news in late August. Then came the announcement that the GPTs we already have will stop running on December 11.
So I called in the person I trust most on this. Wendy Breakstone teaches non-techie coaches, program creators, and service experts how to build simple AI automations and AI employees that grow their income without adding to their workload or requiring them to hire. She has more than 20 years of marketing and operations experience across high-tech companies, best-selling authors, and e-commerce brands, and she has been teaching custom GPTs since they launched in late 2023. She was building AI assistants on other platforms before ChatGPT even had the feature. I'm a member of her free community, The Solo Expert Advantage, and I love it. She also happens to use my OfferMojo Squad every day, Kai and Grace especially, so she had some skin in this game too.
What follows is our conversation about what to protect right now and where else you can build, so you can make a calm, smart decision about your GPTs before the deadline makes it for you.
Custom GPTs Are Going Away, and It's More Nuisance Than Crisis
Custom GPTs are going away. OpenAI is retiring them on December 11, 2026 and moving people toward plugins and skills. Wendy's advice is to treat this as a nuisance you can handle, because your intellectual property is going nowhere.
Wendy was clear from the first minute. Don't panic, take a deep breath, and don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. ChatGPT wasn't the first platform to host AI assistants. Wendy was building them elsewhere before November 2023, which means the functionality can live somewhere else too.
Her comparison made it click for me. If Kit sent you an email tomorrow saying it was closing, you wouldn't decide you're never going to email your list again. You'd take the frustration, sit with the nuisance for a day, and start moving your list, your sequences, and your automations to another platform. That's all this is.
I'll add one honest note from my side. For those of us who have a lot riding on our GPTs, it's also a time crunch. The work is manageable, but the calendar is real.
The First Two Things to Do With Your Custom GPTs
Make a full backup of every GPT today, including the instructions, the title, and all the knowledge docs. Then stop selling or giving your GPTs away until you know what your new version will be.
Step one: back up everything inside your GPTs. Copy the instructions, the title, and the knowledge files into Google Drive or wherever you keep your business documents. Wendy doesn't want you waking up on December 11 realizing you never made a copy, then being mad at ChatGPT about it.
I did this from the beginning, and I'd recommend it to anyone building on any platform. All of my knowledge docs and instructions for the Squad live in Google Drive, because I've always known we might have to move one day. But Wendy caught something I hadn't thought about. Most of us have gone into a GPT at some point and tweaked the instructions as our methodology evolved, and then forgotten to update the copy in Drive. So even if you backed up at the start, back up again now.
As Wendy put it, you won't lose your intellectual property. What you'd lose is the structure you built your intellectual property into, and that structure took real hours to get right.
Step two: pause sales until you have a game plan. Don't wait until the last minute. Wendy's suggestion is to act as if you're losing your GPTs on December 11, even if OpenAI ends up extending the date. Spend a couple of weeks in October rebuilding and testing on a new platform, then relaunch once it's ready. She floated a Black Friday relaunch. I hate Black Friday, so that part isn't for me, but the timing logic holds.
What You Owe the People Who Bought Your Custom GPT
You don't owe them a refund for a decision OpenAI made. Wendy's position is that lifetime access has always meant the life of the product, and this retirement is outside the creator's control.
This is the question that set off my friend's text, so I put it to Wendy. Her answer was plain. There's no such thing as lifetime access, she said. What it really means is the life of the product, whatever length that turns out to be. And the creator isn't the one ending it. I didn't decide to stop offering the OfferMojo Squad inside ChatGPT. ChatGPT decided that for me.
Wendy has also been getting a lot of emails from the other side of this: people who bought someone else's GPT and want to know if they can turn it into a skill for themselves. The answer is no. When you buy access to a custom GPT, you never get the behind-the-scenes custom instructions, so you have nothing to convert. The only way a buyer gets a skill version is if the creator builds it and offers it to them.
Turning a Custom GPT Into a Skill Hands Over Your Playbook
For your own internal use, or for clients who have already paid to learn your methodology, a skill works well. For anything public or low-priced that carries your core IP, think twice, because a skill is your instructions in a plain text file that anyone can open and repackage.
This is the part of the conversation I most wanted to have, because it's where people are rushing. Custom GPTs had one quiet advantage: people could use your IP without seeing it. Unless someone knew how to jailbreak a GPT, your instructions stayed hidden.
A skill works the other way. "The skill actually is the instructions," Wendy told me. "The skill is the playbook." It's a markdown file, which is plain text, often bundled with the same reference files that ran your GPT. The minute you hand that to someone, you've handed over your methodology. And because skills are so easy to edit, it takes about one prompt for someone to ask Claude to tweak yours, repackage it, and sell it as their own.
When a Skill Makes Sense for Your IP
A skill makes sense when the person receiving it has already paid to learn what's inside. Wendy and I both keep skills away from low-priced and public buyers for anything that carries our core methodology.
I moved the OfferMojo Squad so it runs on Claude as skills, and I keep it for internal use. The Squad comes with my OfferMojo Studio, but I haven't handed the skill files to any client or student. Wendy told me straight out that she wouldn't turn the Squad into skills for buyers either.
Wendy's approach is layered. Some of her marketing GPTs, like her Email Profit Framework and Offer Buzz, are free resources she plans to move to another platform. For clients in her higher-ticket programs, she has already turned her GPTs into skills. Her logic is that those clients have already learned her IP inside the program, so a skill gives them nothing they don't already have.
I'll admit something here too. I own a lot of skills I've bought or been given, including a content mining skill that came in a bundle. I could hand it to anyone in about ten seconds. I won't, because I care about doing business with integrity, but plenty of people will. Wendy's view is that this problem isn't new. People have always shared course logins and GPT links. Skills just make it easier.
One more thing that surprised me. You don't need Claude to use skills. Claude launched them first, but skills now work across most of the large language models, including ChatGPT and Grok Bot. If you've always been a ChatGPT person, you can have ChatGPT build and install a skill for you.
Where Else You Can Move a Custom GPT
The main options Wendy recommends for solo coaches and experts are RadGenius, Pickaxe, vibe-coded apps on platforms like Lovable or Base44, and shareable artifacts. Every one of them shifts the cost of your users' activity onto you.
RadGenius (radgenius.dev) is the most affordable place Wendy mentioned. You connect your own OpenAI API key and pick a lower-cost model, and it doesn't run you much. It works with ChatGPT models only, so if you want Claude, it isn't the fit.
Pickaxe (pickaxe.co) has been around since early 2023, before ChatGPT launched custom GPTs, and Wendy has been building on it since then. Its plans cost more than RadGenius, but they include usage credits, and it gives you access to Claude models. Wendy trusts it because the team keeps upgrading the platform. When we recorded, Pickaxe was where I was headed with the Squad. After we stopped recording, Wendy and I kept talking, and I'm now leaning in a different direction. I'll tell you more about that soon.
Vibe-coded tools are Wendy's own route for some of her GPT-style assistants. She built them on platforms like Lovable and Base44. Some people are also turning their GPTs into artifacts and sharing those.
The Hidden Costs of Moving Off ChatGPT
You pay for every user's usage, and the answers tend to come back less rich than they did inside ChatGPT. Both are worth knowing before you move a freebie or a low-priced tool.
The first cost is money. Inside ChatGPT, your buyers installed your GPT into their own account and paid for their own usage. The minute you move to a third-party platform, you're connecting your API key, which means you pay for every conversation. On a paid tool that's manageable. On a freebie, Wendy warned, even the pennies add up.
The second cost is quality, and this one is harder to explain. When someone uses a GPT inside ChatGPT, it knows them. It has their memory, their business details, the way they communicate. Once you move to another platform, everything runs through the API, which Wendy described as a big invisible pipe that pushes information to the model and brings the response back. That pipe doesn't carry any of what the app knows about the person, so the responses come out less customized, no matter how well you tune the knowledge docs.
That could be a reason to offer skills, Wendy said. Could be. It depends on how valuable your material is. And she said something that I think every expert needs to hear. We all think our stuff is the most valuable thing in the world, but information is commoditized. What people are buying is how the information is presented and the person who provides it. That's your mojo, and nobody can download it from a text file.
ChatGPT Is Replacing Custom GPTs With Plugins
A plugin bundles a connector to your software together with a skill. It's the same pairing Claude users already have, just gathered into one place.
A connector (in ChatGPT they call it a plugin, and under the hood it's an MCP, a model context protocol) plugs your third-party software straight into the AI. Wendy has both her Claude and ChatGPT connected to Kit. When the AI writes an email she likes, she tells it to make a draft in Kit, and it goes over and does it.
I use this every week with Claude and ClickUp. I plan a project with Claude, then tell it to go into ClickUp and set it all up, put the dates on it, assign it to the right people. When I open ClickUp, it's done. I think back to all the client offer launches I set up in ClickUp by hand over the years and wonder where AI was then. It even catches the changes I forget, like when I adjust one piece and something downstream needs to move with it.
Inside ChatGPT, you'll now find a plugins section with a skills tab, and ChatGPT has its own skill creator, just like Claude does. It will write your skills, install them, and zip them up so you can download and share them. Which brings us right back to the IP question. The plugin model still runs on skills, and skills are open for anyone to read.
Check Someone Else's Skill Before You Install It
Let your own AI review it first. Wendy asks her AI to check every skill she's given against what it knows about her and her offers, then decides whether to use it, drop it, or build her own version.
This was one of my favorite parts of the conversation, because it applies whether or not you ever built a GPT. Not every skill is useful to you. Some have pieces in them that would never fit how you work.
Wendy runs what she calls a director suite, a set of AI directors that know her business and her preferences. When someone gives her a skill, she asks the relevant director whether it's worth using, whether to jettison it, or whether she should build something similar that matches how she works and what she sells.
She's also a big believer in building your own. When she notices a conversation with her AI covering something that recurs, she stops in the middle and says, hey, I think we should make a skill out of this. As a fellow Gen Xer, I laughed at how she put it. We grew up with "if you want something done, do it yourself." Now it's closer to "if you want something done, one of your AI employees may have already done it."
Quick Diagnostic: Your Custom GPT Plan for December 11
Answer these for every GPT you've sold, given away, or rely on in your own delivery.
| Question | Yes | No |
|---|---|---|
| Do you have a copy of every GPT's instructions, title, and knowledge docs outside ChatGPT? | ||
| Does that copy include the edits you've made inside the GPT since you first built it? | ||
| Have you paused sales or giveaways until the new version is ready? | ||
| Do you know which GPTs hold your core IP and which are low-stakes freebies? | ||
| Have you decided what you'll tell the people who bought or downloaded your GPTs? | ||
| If you're moving to a platform that uses your API key, do you know roughly what usage will cost you? | ||
| Will you have time to test the new version with real people before December? | ||
| Would you be comfortable if someone resold the files you're planning to hand over? |
Each no is a task for October. Start with the backup, since everything else depends on having your instructions in hand.
Why the Ethics of AI Feel So Complicated
Almost every tool connects to something we disagree with. Wendy's answer is to be honest about the tradeoffs and still use the tools that help you earn a living.
I wanted to open the conversation up here, because in the communities I'm part of, people still sit in very black-and-white camps. Some refuse to use AI at all because of the harm they see in it. Others use it for everything.
Wendy has been wrestling with this herself. She started using Grok Bot not long ago, and she's not a fan of Elon Musk. So she had to ask herself whether to stand on her morals and skip a tool that will make her more money for about $30 a month, when that $30 isn't going to end up in his wallet. And if she drew the line there, where would it stop? Amazon? Facebook? With all the moral compasses we carry, she said, we wouldn't be able to do anything.
Running an Online Business Without AI
Wendy doesn't think a small online or service-based business can hold up without it. Clients now expect a level of speed and personalization that's hard to deliver by hand.
Her comparison was gasoline. You can decide gasoline is bad for the environment and refuse to drive, but it's going to take you a long time to walk or bike where you need to go. Most of us aren't nonprofits. We need to make money, and nobody wants to wait three extra weeks for the email sequence you promised because you wrote it by hand. She went further and said a VA or OBM who avoids AI to protect billable hours is going to lose clients, because their job is to find ways to save their clients time and money.
She was honest about the environmental side too. Wendy goes through her own trash to pull out recyclables her husband and son missed, down to a little yogurt container. But she doesn't believe one person skipping AI will change where it's going. The data centers are already committed. The train has left the station, so you may as well use it to your advantage.
What Agentic AI Looks Like in a Solo Business
Agentic AI does the work without you having to ask. Wendy's Grok Bot team is the clearest example I've heard: a group of AI employees that coordinate with each other and message her like coworkers would.
I'd never heard of Grok Bot before this conversation, so I asked her for the short version. It's an app where you build a team of AI employees to your specifications, and they all work together. You can have a chief of staff who bosses the others around. They learn fast and update themselves. They even write their own SOPs. Wendy has a team of 11, and it looks like a text thread with a bunch of people.
Every morning, Barb, her chief of staff, reads Wendy's calendar and reports back on what's coming up, along with anything they've discussed that Wendy hasn't marked as closed. If Barb sees an intro call on the calendar, she sends it to Wendy's sales director, who knows how to build a sales call prep report. After the call, Barb reminds the sales director to handle the follow-up. Wendy also has a content scout and a newsletter manager on the team. And it runs on skills. Wendy handed her bots the skills she'd been using in Claude, so she no longer has to open Claude and ask for each step herself. As I told Wendy, it's kind of what you'd hope employees would do.
What Stays Human When You Use AI
Critical thinking stays with you, and so do your relationships. AI is a strong thought partner, and it loves telling you you're right, so you still need real people to run your ideas past.
Wendy's reason is simple. A human is the one buying from you. A human is the one you're cooking dinner for and living with. She also wants people to stay platform agnostic, because tools come and go. She thinks Grok Bot is going to be big, and she's building there, but she loves skills because you can take them anywhere. Custom GPTs just proved why that matters.
If you're open to AI but haven't gone as deep as we have, her advice is to keep exploring and point AI at the money: saving it, making it, keeping it, protecting it. She pointed out that as women, a lot of us aren't wired to want to take advantage of anything, because it feels bad. But AI isn't a person, so go ahead and take advantage of it.
Here's where I landed. Because this technology is moving so fast, I think we're headed for a kind of disconnection. So the more human we can be in our business communities, and the more we connect with people one-on-one, the better. We can't control where AI goes. We can control who we are and how we treat people. Wendy pointed to COVID as a warning. Leaning on AI could make us lonelier, or give us a false sense of companionship that isn't human, and that's worth watching for.
What Waiting Until December Costs You
Waiting costs you the calm version of this decision. You end up rebuilding in a rush and making choices about your IP under pressure, while the people who trusted your GPT wait on you.
The first cost is the structure itself. If you've been refining a GPT for two years and your backup is from the day you built it, those refinements are gone once the GPT stops running. You'd be rebuilding your best thinking from memory.
The second cost is trust. When someone who bought your GPT, or downloaded it as your freebie, clicks the link in December and gets nothing, most of them won't be thinking about OpenAI. They'll remember that your tool stopped working and nobody told them. A short, early email explaining what's changing and when they'll get the new version protects that relationship.
The third cost is the decision you make in a hurry. Under a deadline, the fastest option looks like the best one, and right now the fastest option is zipping up your skills and handing them to everyone. That might be the right call for some of your GPTs. It's a bad call to make at 11pm on December 10 for the one that holds your whole methodology.
And there's the money you didn't plan for. Moving a popular freebie to a platform that runs on your API key without testing it first is how a free tool turns into a monthly bill. Testing in October tells you what it costs before you're committed.
Frequently Asked Questions About Custom GPTs Going Away
When are custom GPTs going away?
Custom GPTs stop running on December 11, 2026. OpenAI's help page lists October 26, 2026 as the date creation of new GPTs ends, and some Enterprise workspaces with an approved deferral get until February 11, 2027. Wendy and I both heard about the creation cutoff in late August, before the official page went up, so the timeline has shifted a bit. Wendy's advice is to plan as though December 11 is firm, even if OpenAI extends it later.
What happens to the custom GPTs I sold or gave away?
They stop working for everyone on the retirement date, including the people who bought or downloaded them. According to OpenAI, migrating a GPT to a plugin doesn't carry over its public sharing settings, and it doesn't hand the replacement to everyone who used the original. The new plugin starts out private. So if people rely on your GPT, you'll need to rebuild it, decide where it lives, and tell them how to get the new version.
Can I turn a custom GPT I bought into a skill?
No. When you buy access to someone else's custom GPT, you never see the custom instructions and knowledge files behind it, so there's nothing for you to convert. Wendy gets this question a lot. The only way you get a skill version is if the original creator builds one and offers it to you, so reach out to the creator and ask what their plan is.
Do skills protect my intellectual property the way custom GPTs did?
No. A custom GPT kept your instructions hidden from users unless someone knew how to jailbreak it. A skill is your instructions, written in a plain text markdown file and often bundled with your reference docs. Anyone who receives it can open it, read your full methodology, edit it, and repackage it. Wendy recommends skills for internal use and for clients who have already learned your IP in a paid program.
What is the best custom GPT alternative for coaches and experts?
It depends on who uses the GPT. For your own internal work, skills are the simplest move. For clients in a higher-ticket program who already know your methodology, skills work well too. For public tools, lead magnets, and low-priced offers, Wendy points to hosted platforms like RadGenius or Pickaxe, or a vibe-coded app on something like Lovable or Base44, which keep your instructions out of view.
Do I need a Claude subscription to use skills?
No. Claude was the first to launch skills, but they now work across most major AI platforms, including ChatGPT and Grok Bot. If you've always worked in ChatGPT, you can ask ChatGPT to build a skill for you and install it right there. Wendy's point is that skills are portable, which is a big part of why she likes them. You aren't locked into any one platform when the next change comes.
Why do my GPT's answers seem worse on other platforms?
Because third-party platforms run through an API, and the API doesn't carry what ChatGPT already knows about the user. Inside ChatGPT, your GPT had access to the person's memory, their business details, and how they communicate. Through an API, the request travels through what Wendy calls a big invisible pipe to the model and back, without that context. Expect answers to feel less tailored, and test before you launch.
What should I tell people who bought lifetime access to my custom GPT?
Tell them early, tell them what's changing, and tell them how they'll get the new version. Lifetime access has always meant the life of the product, and the retirement is OpenAI's decision. You don't owe refunds for a platform change you didn't make. You do owe people clear communication, so they aren't surprised when the link stops working.
What's Next
If this conversation has you rethinking how AI fits into your business, Wendy is the person I'd want in your corner. She teaches this for non-techie experts in a way that makes it feel doable.
Start with her free community, The Solo Expert Advantage, where she shares what's working, what's changing, and how she's building her own AI employees. She also put together a listener gift for you: Wendy's free 21 Easy AI Automations Handbook.
Get the 21 Easy AI Automations Handbook here:
Use code mojo.
Join The Solo Expert Advantage here
About Lori Young
Lori Young is the creator of the OfferMojo framework and the founder of On a Mission Brands. She is an offer strategist, messaging, and business positioning expert who helps transformation-focused coaches, consultants, and subject matter experts design offer ecosystems that elevate their authority and reflect the true depth of their expertise.
About Wendy Breakstone
Wendy Breakstone teaches non-techie coaches, program creators, and service experts how to build simple AI automations and AI employees that grow their income without adding to their workload or requiring them to hire. She calls herself an operations expert and AI enthusiast who uses AI to her advantage and teaches others to do the same. She brings more than 20 years of marketing and operations experience across high-tech companies, best-selling authors, and e-commerce brands, and has taught custom GPTs since they launched in late 2023. She leads the free Skool community The Solo Expert Advantage and The Solo Expert OS, her AI-powered business system for solo experts.
The Solo Expert Advantage (free Skool community)
21 Easy AI Automations Handbook (code mojo): [HANDBOOK LINK]
