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OpenAI won’t let some customers export their chats, but this tool will
ChatGPT Business and Enterprise customers cannot use OpenAI’s normal chat-export feature, unlike users on Free, Plus, Pro and some Education plans. A newly released third-party utility, scrapemychats, offers an unofficial way to archive chats that users can access, highlighting a gap in data portability for paying workplace customers.
Created by journalist Conrad Quilty-Harper and published on GitHub, the tool uses an authenticated browser session to save conversations and available attachments into a locally viewable HTML archive. Enterprise administrators can obtain conversation logs through OpenAI’s Compliance Platform, but those logs are retained for only 30 days unless archived elsewhere; Business users lack an equivalent straightforward option. The tool is slow because ChatGPT limits frequent requests: its documentation estimates that exporting around 600 chats may take several hours, and warns OpenAI could prevent it from working.
In short
- Business customers lack ChatGPT’s standard chat-export option.
- scrapemychats unofficially archives accessible chats and attachments locally.
- Large exports may take hours and could be blocked later.
Steelman: both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Business customers entirely lack an official export option, whilst Enterprise users face a restrictive 30-day retention window—yet free and Plus users enjoy full data export access. This creates an indefensible inconsistency where paying customers have substantially less autonomy over their own data than those on lower-tier plans, making third-party tools a reasonable necessity for proper data stewardship.
The case against
Business and Enterprise accounts operate under distinct governance and compliance frameworks where controlled access serves security purposes that individual accounts do not require; OpenAI's official Compliance Platform provides the protections necessary for these sensitive environments. Restricting unauthorised data access maintains these security controls, and whilst the 30-day retention window may seem limiting, it reflects the balance between access needs and audit requirements in enterprise settings.
Explained simply
ChatGPT, OpenAI's conversational AI tool, allows users to download and archive their conversations for record-keeping or analysis. Most users on Free, Plus, Pro and certain Education plans can export their chats using OpenAI's built-in feature.
Business and Enterprise customers, typically organisations using ChatGPT as part of their operations, cannot access this export option. Enterprise users can obtain conversation logs through OpenAI's Compliance Platform, though these are automatically deleted after 30 days unless archived separately; Business customers lack a straightforward way to save their conversations.
This gap has led to the creation of scrapemychats, an unofficial tool created by journalist Conrad Quilty-Harper and released on GitHub, which enables users to export their chats independently. The tool works by accessing conversations through an authenticated browser session and saving them as locally-viewable HTML files, though it operates slowly due to ChatGPT's rate limiting, with exporting several hundred chats potentially taking hours.