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Never used oneof these before?
This page has no jargon in it. If you have been told you should try ChatGPT and you are not sure whether it is safe, whether it costs anything, or whether you can believe what it tells you — those are the right questions, and they are the ones answered here.
What are these things, actually?
They are websites you type a question into, and they write you back in ordinary English. You do not install anything. You do not need to learn anything. You open a page, type “write me a polite email cancelling a dentist appointment”, and it does.
You will see the word model used a lot, including elsewhere on this site. A tool is the website you use — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. A model is the engine inside it. You do not need to care which engine a tool uses any more than you need to know what is under the bonnet of a taxi.
Do I have to pay?
No, not to start. 6 of the tools we track publish a free version on their own website, and that includes the well-known ones. You can use them without giving anyone a card number.
They all also sell a paid version, usually around £20 a month, which is faster and lets you do more in a day. There is no reason to pay for one until you have used a free one enough to know you want it.
Is it safe to type things into?
It depends on the company, so we read what each one publishes and quote it word for word. The honest summary: 16 of the 28 companies we checked use what you type to help teach their systems. 10 of those say you can switch that off in the settings.
And 21 of them keep what you type for as long as they decide they need it, without saying when they will delete it.
3 companies say plainly that they do not use your words to teach their systems:
- Cursor — They will not use your inputs to train their AI models unless you explicitly agree to it.their own words, on cursor.com ↗ · read 7 Aug 2026
- Fireflies.ai — The company explicitly states that it does not use your personal information or meeting content to train its AI models.their own words, on fireflies.ai ↗ · read 7 Aug 2026
- n8n — The company explicitly states that they do not use your personal data to train artificial intelligence models.their own words, on n8n.io ↗ · read 7 Aug 2026
Being fair about this: those three are built for particular jobs — writing code, taking notes in meetings — rather than for chatting. They are not swaps for ChatGPT. They are simply the ones whose published policy is strictest, and you asked who they were.
So what should I never type into one?
Passwords. Card or bank details. Your National Insurance number. Anything private about another person who has not agreed to it. Anything you would not put in an email to a stranger.
That is our advice rather than any company’s, and it follows from the two facts above: most of them learn from what you type, and most of them keep it.
Can I believe what it tells me?
Not without checking. 12 of these companies say so themselves, in their own terms and conditions — that the answers can be wrong.
They are confident when they are wrong, which is the difficult part. It will give you a wrong date, a book that does not exist or a law that was never passed in exactly the same calm voice it uses when it is right.
A good habit: use it for things you can check or judge yourself — rewriting your own letter, explaining a word, suggesting ten names for a cat. Be careful with anything where being wrong costs you something: medicines, money, legal deadlines, dates and numbers. Never let it be your only source for those.
Why should I believe you?
You do not have to. Every fact on this page came from a page the company published itself, and each one is linked so you can go and read it. The dates are there because a policy can change the week after we read it.
Nobody pays us to be listed or to be recommended. If you want to see exactly how the tests are run — and it does get technical — it is all on how we test. You do not need to read it to use this page.