SheetAI

Usually not. The pricing page lists a BYOK Free plan at $0 with unlimited SHEETAI calls through your own OpenAI, Claude, Gemini or Grok key; you pay only the provider’s token bill. The setup guide has you paste the key into the sidebar settings and says it is stored in your Google account and never sent to SheetAI servers. A ChatGPT Plus subscription is not an API key: the error guide says it does not cover API usage, so a paid API account is a separate step.

Starter at $12 a month makes sense when you do not want a provider account at all: it runs on hosted AI for up to about 500 runs a month. Pro at $29 drops that number for a soft unlimited allowance and adds bulk media jobs.

Each function works like any other spreadsheet formula. The SHEETAI guide shows =SHEETAI(B13) reading a prompt from another cell, so filling the formula down a column sends one request per row. =SHEETAI_LIST(prompt, 3) spills three answers into the cells below, and SHEETAI_TABLE returns a fixed number of rows split into columns. SHEETAI_FILL looks at a range with examples and fills a missing value from the pattern.

Optional arguments set the response length, temperature and model. The models page marks GPT-3.5 Turbo as the default and lists codes such as “4o-m” for GPT-4o Mini or “c3s” for Claude 3 Sonnet. For data from other services, SHEETAI_API calls a URL from a cell and can return a single JSON field.

Limits come from three places. Google Sheets stops a custom function after 30 seconds, and the error guide says slow responses then fail with an execution-time error. Google also caps external calls at 20,000 a day for gmail.com accounts and 100,000 for Workspace accounts. Your AI provider adds its own per-minute and per-day quotas; the rate-limit guide gives typical ranges of 3 to 60 requests a minute.

• Work in batches of 10 to 20 rows, as the guide suggests.
• Paste finished results as values, because Sheets can recalculate AI formulas when the file is reopened or edited.
• Raise the max_tokens argument, up to 4,000, if answers come back cut off.

The owner does. According to the FAQ, anyone with edit access can use the SheetAI functions in a shared spreadsheet, but every call is charged to the API key of the spreadsheet owner. On a sheet shared with many editors, that makes a spending limit at the provider worth setting; the FAQ suggests $5 to $10 a month as a starting point.

Several. The FAQ still describes a free plan with 50 AI calls a month and an $8 Unlimited plan, while the pricing page lists BYOK Free, Starter and Pro; the plan figures here follow the pricing page. The rate-limit guide mentions a built-in key shared by free users, which the BYOK plan does not describe. The Terms of Service name no company address or governing law; the company name, IndianAppGuy Tech Pvt Ltd, appears in the site footer and the Marketplace listing.

1. Install the add-on from the Google Workspace Marketplace and paste an API key with a low spending limit.
2. Put 20 short customer comments you are allowed to use in column A.
3. In B1 enter =SHEETAI(“Label this comment as praise, complaint or question: ” & A1) and fill it down to B20.
4. Note the token use in the sidebar’s Show Activity panel and in the provider dashboard.
5. Close and reopen the file, then check whether the provider records new calls.

Accept if all 20 rows return one of the three labels and reopening adds no unexpected calls. Reject if rows time out or labels drift outside the three options. No result is recorded here.