Coming soon: use the ChatGPT plan you already pay for

The problem with “bring your own key”

Most apps that let you ask an AI about your own files have the same awkward first step: go to a developer console, create an account, add a payment card, generate an API key, copy it, paste it into the app, and hope you never have to think about it again. For developers that's a two-minute job. For almost everyone else it's where they give up.

It's also a little absurd. If you pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, you already pay for a very good AI every month. You shouldn't need a second account, a second bill and a string of random characters just to point that same AI at your own notes.

So we built a way to skip all of it.

What Sign in with ChatGPT does

You sign in to ReticulOS with your ChatGPT account, the same way you'd sign in to any other app with Google or Apple. From then on, when you ask Ret a question, the answer is written by ChatGPT and counted against your plan's usage, instead of an API key or a separate subscription.

A few things follow from that:

• There's no key to create, copy or lose. Signing in is the whole setup.
• There's nothing extra to pay us for AI. Connecting your own AI is free on every ReticulOS plan, including the free one. See pricing if you want the details.
• You get the model you already use. Ret's badge shows which one is answering.

How signing in will work

The flow is short, and every step happens somewhere you'd expect:

1. Press CtrlShiftSpace. The widget flips from your notes to Ret, the AI.
2. Open Ret's settings with the gear icon.
3. In the ChatGPT plan section, choose Continue with ChatGPT.
4. Your browser opens OpenAI's own sign-in page. Sign in there, and approve ReticulOS.
5. You're sent straight back to the app. Ret's badge now reads ChatGPT plan, followed by the model it's using.

The important detail is step 4: you never type your ChatGPT password into ReticulOS. Signing in happens on OpenAI's page, in your own browser, and ReticulOS only receives the permission you approved. What it keeps is that sign-in, stored encrypted on your computer. It isn't sent to our servers, because it doesn't need to be.

The same settings section has Manage usage, which takes you to your ChatGPT account, and Disconnect, which signs ReticulOS out of it.

What ChatGPT sees, and what it doesn't

This is the part people ask about first, and fairly so.

When you ask Ret something, ReticulOS does the searching on your own computer. It looks through your notes, PDFs, pictures and recordings, finds the handful of passages most likely to answer the question, and only then talks to ChatGPT. What goes over the wire is your question and those chosen passages. Not the collection, not your library, and never the password vault, which Ret can't see at all.

If you'd like to understand how that search works, we wrote about it in How Ret finds the right note.

Which plans

It's designed for ChatGPT Plus and Pro. Not every account is allowed to share its plan with other apps. If yours isn't, ReticulOS tells you when you sign in, so you're not left wondering later why answers aren't coming.

What it opens up next

Answering questions is only half of what a connected AI can do. The same connection powers Ret Agent, also coming soon. Instead of only answering, Ret Agent can do small jobs for you: make a checklist from a messy note, tidy a collection, or look something up on the web and save what it found. It always asks before it changes anything, and every change can be undone.

Until Sign in with ChatGPT is switched on, there's already one way to use an AI you have with your notes, and it's free: apps like Claude, Cursor and Claude Desktop can search ReticulOS directly. Here's how to connect them.