That's very interesting, thanks for sharing your experience. Do you find the third-party subscriptions worth it, or are you saying that you're finding the free third-party tools better than the paid GPT-4?
I found Phind much much better than ChatGPT Pro with Browsing/Search Plugins. Phind is free for now, but I'd gladly subscribe if they offer it to avoid going bankrupt.
Edit: I think phind.com switched to ChatGPT-4 Pro. They used to use GPT-4 API but after the switch, there's a noticeable degradation in quality of responses. :(
Even Bing works better than ChatGPT-4, but the problem with Bing is limited context window (can only type 2000 tokens in the chat). In comparison, Phind allows for 6000 tokens!