Ask HN: Why does anyone pay for ChatGPT Plus? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why does anyone pay for ChatGPT Plus?

16 points_kque26 comments

I don't understand why people are paying $20/month for ChatGPT, that has a bunch of limitations, when you could just use an open-source chat interface like Chatbox + your GPT-4 API key?

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Lots of reasons.

Brand. People prefer things they’re familiar with and things that people they personally know also use, they intuitively feel that they’re less likely to have a bad experience with those. And that’s generally true. Many more people have friends who use chatgpt plus than have friends who use the gpt playground or an open source ui.

Fixed fee will be preferable for some. The risk of it being unexpectedly high may outweigh the benefit of an average lower cost.

Access to plugins plus the official iOS app.

The biggest reason is the familiarity with the brand and because they’ve heard of chatgpt plus from many places, but they haven’t heard of these other options. Plus for most people, the idea of getting an api key and all of that is going to be a little intimidating.

Overall, if it was any family member of mine I’d recommend that they used chatgpt plus rather than getting an api key.

Personally I use the gpt playground, but I also recognize that to 99% of gpt users that’s inferior, even though I significantly prefer it myself.

I'm surprised nobody is mentioning one of the largest factors. If you're a heavy user of chatGPT, the equivalent cost of using the smallest GPT4 model would run you a hell of a lot more.

The cost of the GPT-4 API is ballpark around $0.05 / 1000 tokens. If you want to include a rolling context window, you will easily hit 1000+ tokens if not a huge amount more. ChatGPT pro gives you 50 GPT-4 queries every three hours. If you're using it all day you might average about 100 daily queries. Using a dedicated GPT4 API would run you approximately five dollars a day for the same thing - that's $150 a month as opposed to flat cost of $20.

OpenAI does not provide access to GPT-4 32K tokens model via API. Also they have weird restriction that you don't get access to even weaker GPT-4 model unless you had paid them at least 1$ before for API usage. They API prices are quite cheap, so I have to artificially generate lot of requests to them against GPT-3, so that I can pay them 1$, so that I get access to GPT-4. As far as I understand, this is the way to go currently.

I do, I generally don't trust utility billing. I'm not running a service here, I just want to ask Jarvis some stuff

The open source solutions have mental overhead and potentially long term maintenance hassle. Even for people who could set it up, for many $20 is worth not having to deal with it.

Access to GPT 4 (have not got access yet to GPT 4 with API). Access to extensions (I use webpage summarization extension one time extensively)

It is a total clusterfuck how you even get access to the API. So people pay because they want a convenient way to get access to GPT-4.

Did they change it recently? When I got it 2 years ago you pretty much just opened an account and put in a credit card. Or you mean specifically to GTP-4? If so I think they made it generally available for everyone now https://openai.com/blog/gpt-4-api-general-availability

Probably makes economic sense for most users to go with API. On the other hand - is it worth saving a couple of dollars to even have to worry about the risk of a huge bill? (You use it way too much, you accidentally leak your key, you make a mistake when coding a UI and put it in a loop, etc).

You can set hard limits on usage to remove that risk.

Indeed. I believe it's even stricter than that; you actually have to request a quota increase that has to be approved in order to spend more than 120$, the default spend hard limit.

Easy, with so many stories of people getting bills for absurd amounts when using usage based pricing, I rather pay slightly more but a fixed amount and have one less thing to worry about.

Can you just sign up for gpt 4 apis? I was under the impression it was wait listed.

https://openai.com/blog/gpt-4-api-general-availability

Anyone like my grandma?

$20 is a flat rate. How much would I spend on the API?

If your grandma is advanced enough to need ChatGPT Plus, then yes, 'anyone' would include your grandma.

You would spend this much - https://openai.com/pricing

You don't need to be advanced to get access to better models and other nice stuff.

Anyway, why are you outraged about how people spend their money on convenience?

I'd understand if you were fighting the system, running your model locally, etc.

Have you ever bought a packaged/frozen meal at the grocery store?

You know, if you buy the raw ingredients, you end up paying a lot less, and can even pick ingredients and spices you like more than the prepackaged mixes. The ingredients are objectively superior and you can pick a diet that fills your nutritional needs without waste or leftovers. If you meal prep, it doesn't even take significantly more time than frozen meals too.

Some people like the the certainty of knowing there is a pizza in their freezer they can toss in the oven and eat in 10 minutes, even though it would be objectively tastier, healthier, and cheaper to get into the habit of making their own.

99% of people don't even know what's an API key.

Not everyone has yet access to GPT4 with API.

Yes they do

nope, I created a new openai account a few days ago they only gave me access to GPT 3.5(16K)

https://openai.com/blog/gpt-4-api-general-availability

>Today all existing API developers with a history of successful payments can access the GPT-4 API with 8K context.

My account at that time had not made any payments so it did not aplied to it.

>We plan to open up access to new developers by the end of this month, and then start raising rate-limits after that depending on compute availability.

They have not given access to me yet.

Convenience and access to plugins such as wolfram alpha.

Convenience.

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