OpenAI locks Business and Enterprise users out of chat exports, but a free tool can help
Paying ChatGPT customers on higher tiers cannot download their own conversations through the usual settings. A developer built a workaround, though it may not last long.
Key points
- OpenAI's standard chat-export feature is available to Free, Plus, and Pro users but is not available to Business or Enterprise workspace subscribers.
- Freelance journalist Conrad Quilty-Harper published a free tool called Scrapemychats on GitHub this week to fill that gap.
- Enterprise admins can access conversation logs through OpenAI's Compliance Platform, but those logs are deleted after 30 days unless manually archived elsewhere.
- Scrapemychats works through a real logged-in browser session and stores chats as an offline-readable HTML archive on your own computer.
- Quilty-Harper expects OpenAI to block the tool soon and acknowledges it may breach the platform's terms of service.
If you pay for a ChatGPT Business or Enterprise account, you might expect to be able to download your own conversations whenever you like. You cannot. OpenAI's standard data-export option, the one that lets you grab a tidy copy of your chat history, is simply not available at those subscription tiers.
That gap annoyed Quilty-Harper enough to build something about it. "I made the stupid decision to upgrade from a personal account to a Business one a while back as they prompted," he told The Register AI, "and for some reason OpenAI doesn't let you export the data easily."
So what does Scrapemychats actually do?
It gives Business and Enterprise subscribers an unofficial way to retrieve their own conversations before closing or switching accounts. The tool, free to download on GitHub, logs into your ChatGPT account inside a real browser window, opens each conversation one by one, and saves the text and any file attachments to a folder on your computer. The result is a local archive you can browse offline, laid out like an email inbox.
Because it uses a real browser rather than running invisibly in the background, OpenAI's bot-protection systems do not immediately block it. The trade-off is speed. OpenAI slows down anything that hammers its servers with rapid requests, so the tool crawls. Downloading 600 chats takes "a few hours," according to the GitHub readme. You can pause and resume, at least.
Should Business users be worried about their data?
That depends on whether you knew your chats were already hard to retrieve. Enterprise admins can access workspace conversation logs through OpenAI's Compliance Platform, but those logs disappear after 30 days unless someone exports them elsewhere first. Business-tier users have even less: no simple archive option at all.
For anyone considering switching to a different AI tool, that matters. Your prompts, your pasted documents, your generated outputs, none of it is easy to take with you.
Quilty-Harper is blunt about the likely reason. Keeping subscribers locked in is a plausible motive, he suggests, though OpenAI has not publicly explained the omission. AI2Day asked OpenAI for comment and received no response.
How long will this tool work?
Probably not long. "I expect OpenAI will stop this from working shortly after you write about it," Quilty-Harper predicted. He also concedes it likely breaches OpenAI's terms of service. Use it at your own discretion and grab a copy of the GitHub repository before the loophole closes.
Installation requires a few command-line steps, all documented in the GitHub readme. If "command line" sounds daunting, ask a tech-comfortable colleague for ten minutes of their time. The export itself then runs with minimal fuss.
On the broader point, Quilty-Harper put it plainly: "I would quite like to know the reason why ChatGPT doesn't make it easy for paying customers to get access to their data." That feels like a fair question.
Common questions
Does this tool send my chats to anyone else?
No. According to the GitHub readme, all data is stored locally on your own computer, not uploaded to any server.
Is Scrapemychats free?
Yes, it is free and open source. You download and run it yourself; there is no subscription or sign-up.
What if I am on a Free, Plus, or Pro plan?
You already have access to OpenAI's built-in export feature in Settings. Go to Settings, then Data Controls, and click "Export data" to get a full copy of your chats.
