OpenAI Dots: what are they, and is $500 a month worth it?

OpenAI just launched "Dots" alongside a new $500 a month plan, and most people's reaction was a polite "...what?" Fair enough. "Dot" means nothing. And didn't we already have AI that clicks around and does tasks for us? So what is new here?

The one word that matters: always on

Earlier agent tools worked like a job order. You start a task, watch it click through a browser, it finishes, it is gone. Dots are different because they stay. Each Dot is an agent powered by OpenAI's top model, with its own computer and its own browser in the cloud, hooked into more than four thousand apps. It sits in the background, keeps an eye on things and acts by itself when something happens.

Think of it like this. The old tools were hiring someone by the hour. A Dot is hiring someone on a full-time contract who waits at the desk for work to show up.

So I have to pay $500 a month to get one?

No, and this is the bit the marketing quietly blurs. Dots do not have their own price tag. Your first Dot comes with any Pro plan, and the cheapest one is $100 a month. Free, Go and Plus users get none. The $500 tier is not "the Dots plan". It is the scale plan: about 25 times the usage of Plus, plus a new Ultrafast speed mode.

So the real question is not "is a Dot worth $500". It is "do I have so much work for my agents that the $100 limits are not enough?" For almost everyone, even heavy users, the honest answer is no. Where $500 does make sense is when an agent is running around the clock and genuinely replacing work you would otherwise pay a person to do. Next to a salary, $500 a month looks cheap. Paid just to feel like you have the best version, with nothing for it to chew on, it is money down the drain.