Technology ChatGPT Plugins

See also: ChatGPT Plugins, ChatGPT Plugin Categories and Technology

Technology ChatGPT Plugins were the group of third-party extensions in the ChatGPT Plugins store that focused on technology news, software documentation, repository search, and general developer or technologist utilities. They are deprecated and no longer usable: OpenAI closed the plugin store to new installs on March 19, 2024 and shut down all remaining plugin conversations on April 9, 2024. ^[9] Their capabilities were carried forward by Custom GPTs and the Actions mechanism in the GPT Store, then by ChatGPT connectors, then by OpenAI's March 2025 adoption of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and finally by Apps in ChatGPT and the OpenAI Apps SDK, which OpenAI launched on October 6, 2025. ^{[18] [19]} No technology plugin can be installed or run today; the entries described below are documented for historical reference.

During their lifetime the technology plugins sat alongside, and sometimes overlapped with, the more strictly developer-oriented Software Development ChatGPT Plugins and Programming ChatGPT Plugins groupings used by community directories during the plugin era. The category covered tools that surfaced industry headlines, fetched live reference material from documentation sites, queried code hosts such as GitHub, and produced media artefacts like text to speech audio.

The category existed for roughly thirteen months. It opened with the launch of plugins on March 23, 2023, expanded rapidly through the broader beta rollout that began on May 12, 2023, and disappeared after OpenAI closed the plugin store on March 19, 2024 and shut down all remaining plugin chats on April 9, 2024. The functions provided by technology plugins were largely absorbed by Custom GPTs and the GPT Store, which used a similar action and OpenAPI mechanism to call out to external services. ^{[9] [15] [16]}

What were Technology ChatGPT Plugins?

When ChatGPT launched plugins on March 23, 2023, the initial alpha included thirteen partners: Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, Zapier, and a knowledge base retrieval plugin open sourced by OpenAI. OpenAI also hosted two first party plugins itself, a web browser and Code Interpreter. Wolfram was the most overtly technical of the launch group, giving the GPT-4 backed chat the ability to call Wolfram Alpha and Wolfram Language for computation, curated knowledge, and real time data. Zapier was likewise widely used by technologists because it bridged ChatGPT to thousands of software as a service products. ^{[1] [2]}

Access in the first weeks was gated behind a waitlist for ChatGPT Plus subscribers and developers. OpenAI moved plugins from alpha to a wider Plus beta starting the week of May 12, 2023, at which point more than seventy third party plugins were available, with the count rising to roughly two hundred by late May, around four hundred by mid 2023, eight hundred by August 5, 2023, and over nine hundred by the time community directories stopped indexing the store. Many of the new entries were technology focused because the OpenAPI based plugin format suited developer minded teams that already had a public API. ^{[3] [6]}

Directories of the period, including plugin.surf, gptstore.ai, whatplugin.ai, and Orren Prunckun's running list on Medium, classified plugins into loose buckets such as travel, shopping, finance, productivity, education, and technology. The technology bucket itself was not formally defined by OpenAI; it emerged from how third party catalogues grouped plugins whose primary subject was the tech industry, programming ecosystems, or the wider craft of building software. The Speechki plugin already documented in this article fit alongside that group as a media technology utility. ^{[3] [4]}

Which plugins were in the technology category?

The table below lists technology category plugins that can be cross checked through at least two contemporaneous sources. Release dates are taken from plugin store registration records as preserved by directory archives. Where an entry only appears in a single directory it has been omitted. ^{[10] [11] [14]}

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This list is not exhaustive. Several plugins that occasionally appeared in technology category lists, such as Crunchbase data lookups or specific company plugins, are excluded because their store registration could not be cross referenced.

Speechki

Speechki is the entry that originally seeded this article and was the only plugin with a direct text to audio purpose in the technology grouping. The Speechki team announced the plugin on the OpenAI developer forum on May 3, 2023, while approval was still pending, and the plugin was added to the store on May 20, 2023. It supported GPT-4 backed chats and exposed three delivery options: a downloadable audio link, a hosted audio player page, and an embed snippet that could be dropped into a website. The team described its longer roadmap on the same forum thread, including language and voice selection, audio cataloguing, playlist creation, multi voice narration, podcast tools, and an audio content marketplace with creator revenue opportunities. Reviews on Product Hunt placed the plugin at fourth most upvoted of the month for June 2023. ^{[7] [8]}

Later in the plugin's life Speechki added support for more than 300 voices across 78 languages and dialects, with users reporting variable quality outside English, and the company listed the plugin as the only approved text to audio solution in the store. ^[11]

Wolfram

Wolfram Research's plugin was the technology category's earliest and most visible launch entry. Stephen Wolfram described the integration in a March 2023 essay, framing it as a way to give ChatGPT what he called Wolfram superpowers: deterministic computation, structured data, and access to Wolfram Alpha's curated knowledge base. The plugin was called automatically by the model when a query needed mathematics, scientific data, finance figures, or symbolic manipulation that the underlying large language model was unlikely to handle reliably on its own.

In April 2023 Wolfram followed up with the Wolfram ChatGPT Plugin Kit, a notebook driven environment for spinning up custom plugins backed by the Wolfram Cloud. The kit reduced plugin authorship for technologists who already worked in Wolfram Language to a few cells of code. Many other plugins later borrowed elements of this design, in particular the convention of pairing a clearly typed OpenAPI surface with a plain English description for the model. ^[5]

Zapier

Zapier's plugin let ChatGPT trigger Zaps that connected to over five thousand applications, including Gmail, Slack, Google Sheets, HubSpot, Trello, Microsoft Teams, and Salesforce. For technologists it acted as a glue layer, enabling chat driven automations that would otherwise require custom code or webhook plumbing. Zapier later sunset the ChatGPT plugin in line with OpenAI's deprecation schedule: new conversations stopped on March 19, 2024 and existing ones stopped working on April 9, 2024. The company pointed users at Zapier's AI Actions for Custom GPTs, which by then reached more than 9,000 apps, as the successor. ^[20]

Tech news aggregators

Three tech news plugins clustered around the same June 2023 window. TechPulse wrapped Hacker News, exposing five commands matching its sections: fetchTopStories, fetchNewStories, fetchAskStories, fetchShowStories, and fetchJobStories. The manifest carried a description for the model that emphasised personalised image links accompanying featured stories. The author was Roberts at aigenprompt.com, the same publisher behind a small portfolio of related plugins. ^[4]

AI News Roundup retrieved a daily summary of the day's artificial intelligence headlines through a single getHeadline command, returning JSON containing a list of clickable links. It was published by Orren Prunckun, who also maintained a public list of approved ChatGPT plugins through 2023.

Man of Many was launched by the Australian men's lifestyle publisher of the same name and was reported as the first ChatGPT plugin from a major publisher. It surfaced editorial content covering products, culture, and style. While not strictly a developer focused plugin, it consistently appeared in tech and news clusters because its catalogue leaned heavily on consumer technology coverage. ^{[12] [13]}

Developer adjacent technology plugins

A second cluster of technology plugins overlapped with the software development ChatGPT plugins and programming ChatGPT plugins groupings. DEV Community connected ChatGPT to dev.to, the public Forem instance run by DEV. Users could search posts, find collaborators, and surface learning resources without leaving the chat. Repo Radar focused on GitHub repository discovery, allowing searches by topic, language, or repository name and returning README content for any matching project, which the model could then use to write code likely to compile against that repository's interfaces. AskTheCode narrowed the scope further, letting a user paste a GitHub repository URL and then ask natural language questions about the code base. Initial coverage centred on C# projects, with broader language support added later. Repo Inspector offered a more analytical lens, summarising commits, contributors, and language breakdowns for any HTTPS Git URL.

FreshTech sat at the documentation end of the spectrum, fetching the latest pages from named documentation sources to keep the chat aware of changes in libraries and APIs that post dated the model's training data. Show Me Diagrams, by Kirill Dubovitskiy, took a different angle, rendering Mermaid syntax diagrams inline in chat for sequence diagrams, flow charts, and entity relationship sketches. It was widely used by technical writers, system designers, and educators.

How did ChatGPT plugins work?

Every plugin in the technology category followed the same specification. A plugin manifest at /.well-known/ai-plugin.json declared the plugin's name for humans and for the model, a contact email, an authentication scheme, a logo, legal information, and a pointer to an OpenAPI specification. The OpenAPI document, in either YAML or JSON form, defined each available endpoint, its parameters, and its expected response. ChatGPT consumed the manifest when a user installed the plugin and used the OpenAPI description to construct calls. Many plugins, including TechPulse and AI News Roundup, used no authentication; others, such as Zapier, required user authentication.

The OpenAPI lineage carried over directly into Custom GPTs when OpenAI introduced them on November 6, 2023. Custom GPT actions reused the OpenAPI specification convention, which is why most surviving plugin authors were able to migrate their backends with comparatively small changes. Prompt engineering practices that emerged in the plugin era, particularly the description for model field that nudged the chat toward calling the right tool at the right time, also carried over into action descriptions. That same idea, a described and machine readable tool surface, later generalised into the Model Context Protocol and the Apps SDK.

Timeline

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^{[6] [9] [17] [18] [19]}

When were ChatGPT plugins deprecated?

OpenAI announced the deprecation of ChatGPT Plugins in early 2024, citing the broader capability of Custom GPTs as the reason for consolidation. After March 19, 2024 no new plugins could be installed and no new conversations could be started against existing plugins. Existing chats continued to function through April 9, 2024, after which the plugin runtime was fully retired. ^[9] Most technology plugin authors either rebuilt their integrations as Custom GPT actions, redirected users to a standalone web product, or shut down the integration. Zapier published a migration page pointing users at the new GPT Store entry, while Wolfram positioned the Wolfram GPT in the GPT Store as the direct successor to its plugin. ^[20]

What replaced ChatGPT plugins?

The successor to plugins arrived as a chain of four overlapping mechanisms, each of which reused ideas the plugin era had proven.

Custom GPTs and Actions. OpenAI announced Custom GPTs on November 6, 2023 and opened the GPT Store on January 10, 2024, by which point users had already created more than three million custom versions of ChatGPT. ^{[15] [16]} Custom GPT Actions reused the same OpenAPI specification convention that plugins used, so most surviving plugin authors migrated their backends with comparatively small changes. This is the mechanism that absorbed the bulk of the technology plugins, including Wolfram, Zapier, and the repository search tools.

Connectors. In 2025 OpenAI added ChatGPT connectors, which let ChatGPT read directly from external data sources rather than call a bespoke API on each request. OpenAI began testing connectors for Google Drive and Slack in March 2025, extended them to Plus users in August 2025, and folded them into a Company Knowledge feature spanning Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, SharePoint, HubSpot, and more in October 2025. ^[17] Connectors covered much of what documentation and repository plugins such as FreshTech, Repo Radar, and DEV Community had done.

Model Context Protocol. On March 26, 2025 OpenAI adopted the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open tool calling standard that Anthropic had released in November 2024. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote, "People love MCP and we are excited to add support across our products," and OpenAI added MCP support across its Agents SDK, the Responses API, and the ChatGPT desktop app. ^[18] MCP generalised the plugin idea of a described, machine readable tool surface into a vendor neutral protocol that competing AI systems could share.

Apps in ChatGPT and the Apps SDK. On October 6, 2025, at DevDay, OpenAI launched Apps in ChatGPT together with the OpenAI Apps SDK, which is built on MCP. ^[19] Apps run interactive interfaces inside a ChatGPT conversation and are invoked in natural language, for example "Spotify, make a playlist for my party." Launch partners included Spotify, Canva, Zillow, Figma, Coursera, Expedia, and Booking.com. The Apps SDK is the closest present day equivalent to what plugins set out to do: a way for a third party service to appear inside ChatGPT and respond to user requests, but with richer interfaces and an open protocol underneath.

The legacy of the technology category is therefore both architectural and conceptual. The pairing of an OpenAPI surface with a description for model now underpins Custom GPT Actions, and the wider idea of a described tool surface matured into MCP and the Apps SDK across large language model products. Plugins also acted as a testbed for ideas that later matured: tech news aggregation by chat, code base question and answer, diagram generation, repository search, and documentation lookups.

See also

• ChatGPT Plugins
• ChatGPT Plugin Categories
• Software Development ChatGPT Plugins
• Programming ChatGPT Plugins
• Custom GPTs
• GPT Store
• Model Context Protocol
• OpenAI Apps SDK
• GPT-4
• Prompt Engineering

References

1. OpenAI. ChatGPT plugins. openai.com/index/chatgpt-plugins/, March 23, 2023. ↩
2. TechCrunch. OpenAI connects ChatGPT to the internet. techcrunch.com, March 23, 2023. ↩
3. The Decoder. OpenAI rolls out more than 70 ChatGPT plugins including internet access. the-decoder.com, May 2023. ↩
4. Orren Prunckun. A list of all approved ChatGPT plugins as of 11 June 2023. orren.medium.com, June 11, 2023. ↩
5. Stephen Wolfram. Instant Plugins for ChatGPT: Introducing the Wolfram ChatGPT Plugin Kit. writings.stephenwolfram.com, April 27, 2023. ↩
6. Kristi Hines. 800 ChatGPT Plugins: A Complete List. kristihines.com, August 2023. ↩
7. Product Hunt. Speechki ChatGPT Plugin: anything audio. producthunt.com, June 2023. ↩
8. OpenAI Developer Community. Speechki ChatGPT Plugin has been approved and is now available in the store. community.openai.com, May 3, 2023. ↩
9. OpenAI Developer Community. Plugin Store and New Chats With Plugins, Closed March 19, 2024. community.openai.com, 2024. ↩
10. Plugin.surf. TechPulse, AI News Roundup, Repo Radar, AskTheCode plugin pages. plugin.surf, 2023. ↩
11. WhatPlugin.ai. Speechki and TechPulse plugin pages. whatplugin.ai, 2023. ↩
12. AdNews. Man of Many launches ChatGPT Plugin. adnews.com.au, June 2023. ↩
13. Mediaweek. Man of Many launches industry first ChatGPT plugin. mediaweek.com.au, June 2023. ↩
14. GitHub. sisbell/chatgpt-plugin-store manifests for TechPulse and other plugins. github.com, archived January 2026. ↩
15. OpenAI. Introducing GPTs. openai.com/index/introducing-gpts/, November 6, 2023. ↩
16. OpenAI. Introducing the GPT Store. openai.com/index/introducing-the-gpt-store/, January 10, 2024. ↩
17. TechCrunch. OpenAI to start testing ChatGPT connectors for Google Drive and Slack. techcrunch.com, March 17, 2025. ↩
18. TechCrunch. OpenAI adopts rival Anthropic's standard (Model Context Protocol) for connecting AI models to data. techcrunch.com, March 26, 2025. ↩
19. OpenAI. Introducing apps in ChatGPT and the Apps SDK. openai.com/index/introducing-apps-in-chatgpt/, October 6, 2025. ↩
20. Zapier. Sunsetting the Zapier ChatGPT plugin: what you need to know. help.zapier.com, 2024. ↩