Included* (*with the plan you buy first)

I pay $30 a month for Grok Bot Premium. I don’t pay for Claude Pro or ChatGPT Pro, so for Claude Duet and OpenAI’s Dots I read the fine print and the posts.

Three clay-and-ink desk lamps on cream paper, their shades marked with the Duet, OpenAI and Grok Bot emblems, each plugged into a different running meter: a dial in the red zone, a bar gauge and a wheel counter.
Every always-on agent sits on a plan that renews.

Three companies now sell the same promise: an agent with its own cloud computer that keeps working after you close the app and, at least in Duet’s case, asks before it acts. For a solo operator, that pitch lands. The price sits one layer down.

What happened

Claude Duet. Anthropic opened Duet as a waitlisted research preview; 9to5google reported it Oct 21. It runs on Claude Opus 5.5 on its own cloud computer, and Anthropic says it asks before it sends, pays, signs or deletes anything.

Dots. OpenAI calls Dots “always-on agents,” powered by GPT-6 Astra, each with its own cloud computer, reachable in ChatGPT, Slack and Teams. The Register says OpenAI announced them in September.

Grok Bot. It comes inside The X Subscription, and the product page says Bots run 24/7 on their own computer, “even when your laptop is closed,” drawing on a weekly usage pool shared with Grok and Cursor.

What people are saying

I searched X, Hacker News and the press for posts on cost, access and trust. These are posts I opened, not a poll.

Few people can use Duet yet. The Duet posts I found mostly restated Anthropic’s own caveats, and I found none from someone reporting on using it.

The Dots posts I found that touched on cost pointed at the meter. One user, @Obsidian_Signal, wrote on Oct 24: “ChatGPT Dots has felt basically unlimited. That’s exactly why I’m nervous about the caps.” The Register reported on Oct 13 that in tests by security firm Geordie, one dot used more than 300,000 tokens in a day “without further human interaction.” Geordie ran that test with read-only permissions.

Grok Bot posts I found were mostly about billing. After the move to The X Subscription, @hugo_kemnitz wrote on Oct 14 that “the old subscription was not cancelled and no refund done!!” On trust, a commenter in Hacker News’s August launch thread asked: “Are you all comfortable with the idea of agents running non stop with access to all your accounts?” Techdirt reported on Oct 19, citing XMTP Labs CEO Shane Mac, that a Grok Bot posted his bank balances to his company Slack. Per Techdirt, Mac says the bot handling his finances was read-only, but another of his Grok Bots had Slack access.

The asterisks

1. The entry price is the price of a whole plan. Duet needs Claude Pro at $20 a month or Max from $100. Dots need ChatGPT Pro, which starts at $100 a month, or Business Premium. Grok Bot needs Premium at $30 a month; the $8 Plus plan doesn’t include it. If you don’t already pay for one, you are buying a subscription to try an agent.

2. The trial terms don’t match. Neither Claude nor ChatGPT publishes a free trial for Pro. Grok Bot offers some accounts a 7-day usage credit that, per its FAQ, “never turns into a paid plan.” Two other Grok Bot trials do convert: one started in the iOS App Store, and a 2-week Premium trial from a referral link, which needs a credit card. This post carries no referral link.

3. Access has gates before price. Duet is limited to US Pro and Max subscribers, and Anthropic says joining the waitlist “doesn’t guarantee a specific date.” Dots exclude Pro users under 18 and anyone in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, and OpenAI says access “may take several days to reach your account.”

4. The meter is the real price, and it isn’t final. Duet is included in Pro and Max “during the research preview,” with no published price for after, and its background check-ins count against plan limits. OpenAI says more dots will come later, with no price yet. Grok Bot usage past the weekly pool comes from prepaid credit. The X Subscription page describes a monthly limit on extra usage but doesn’t say whether hitting it stops a task mid-run.

What this means if you ship

All three bill like subscriptions and ask for the access you would give an assistant with a key to your inbox. The pitch is the agent. The commitment is the plan, its renewal date, and whatever the agent can reach.

The posts above show what some users worry about, not how well any agent works. I’m not grading the one I pay for.

What to do Monday

  1. Find out who bills you. Each vendor says to cancel on the platform you paid through: web, Apple or Google Play.
  2. Set a reminder two days before renewal. All three vendors’ terms say to cancel at least 24 hours before renewal.
  3. Leave overage off until you know a normal week: Claude usage credits, ChatGPT credits and Grok Bot Auto Top-up. If you turn one on, set the monthly limit first.
  4. Write a draft-only rule anyway. OpenAI’s help page says “Asking for a draft doesn’t authorize sending it.”
  5. Connect the fewest apps. Per their help pages, disconnecting an app doesn’t erase what a dot already got from it, and Duet keeps memory of past information. Start with a calendar, not your main inbox.

The agent is the demo. The plan is the purchase.

Sources

All checked Oct 28, 2026.

Vendor pages:

Reporting:

Posts on X (text read through the X API and confirmed on cdn.syndication.twimg.com):

Hacker News comment (via the Algolia API):

Next: Stored* (*means someone else holds it)