Did you compare the cost of using a GPT plus subscription and use GPT by API? | Hacker News Reader

Did you compare the cost of using a GPT plus subscription and use GPT by API?

19 points0raymond021 comments

As a software engineer, mostly time I use Copilot(Chat) in my daily work. It is very convenient because the Copilot chat is integrated with the VSCode. I have been a GPT Plus user for a couple of months, but recently I canceled my subscription because I found my frequency of GPT Plus is reducing. Now there are a lot of open-source GPT clients, I made a client from one of them and deployed it on my server. I think it is enough for me. So I started to use GPT by the ChatGPT API, its advantage is that I’m only charged as I use it. I don’t know if it is a smart choice, but I’d like to hear your opinions. Did you guys compare the cost of using GPT Plus and ChatGPT API? Any suggestions are welcome.

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I use ChatGPT as well as mckaywrigley/chatbot-ui with GPT-4, and I rack up $300+ charges every month using my own version of ChatGPT, so it's way more expensive (I do roughly the same number of conversations in each). The only reason why I use it is because I can pump in more context than what ChatGPT allows. But if you're using a cheaper model / lower usage then maybe it'd be less expensive. You could also try Perplexity

This comment should be higher up.

The GPT-4 API costs significantly more than the $20/mo ChatGPT Plus subscription, but it does have benefits. Namely, 128k tokens of context with the latest GPT-4-turbo model, so you can put a whole (small) software project or a short book into your prompt.

My experience - anecdotal - is that it is more consistently speedy as well.

It seems like you're getting more than $300 of value out of it if you continue to use it. Would you mind sharing what your use case is and why it's so valuable?

Yes. ChatGPT plus nicely integrates plugins, voice, image generation, and code execution.

Moreover, 20$ per month isn’t that much and I save time compared to setting up alternative clients.

Fair but my costs range from 5 to 19 dollars per month, and i can d9 a whole lot more with the API

d9 = dooooooooo

I find it fascinating how we all first started of hating Copilot but today has accepted it and use it daily now after ChatGPT.

Could be because it improved over time and its value increased as well. It didn't have much on day one either.

I stopped my ChatGPT plus subscription at the start of December. I did not use the interface that much so was never maxxing out the limits. I have instead switched to a combination of Perplexity for knowledge based questions (since there is no knowledge cutoff), and bing chat if I need anything from GPT4. I use api as well but only for longer prompts where i want to test out the output by trying different things.

Coding wise, copilot is great. But my usecase for ai coding assistant is adhoc generating standardized functions (eg: write a listener for firestore document or write a login function with required checks), so chatgpt free version or bing works equally well.

It's more expensive with out a doubt although I don't have the exact numbers, but there is also a huge advantage to it that is volumen of content that you can send and control over the system message. At the end, and this is only my case, I'm using both the premium for short problems and the API for more complex ones.

Estimate and frequency and cost of your queries on ChatGPT and see which one is cheaper. Several months ago I checked, if you max out ChatGPT GPT-4 limits, its cheaper than if all those were via API

I'm curious, why are you using ChatGPT in addition to copilot? I am thinking of switching to Copilot, want to know if there are limitations

Because the Copilot Chat is too convenient when you coding. You can talk about any programming questions with it, you can have it to code review your code. I don't want to switch between the VSCode and ChatGPT.

Using API I can easily exceed $20 a week. The reason is I’m not proficient in programming language, I ask a lot.

Does any of the alternate clients support the Code Executor (the Python Sandbox) of ChatGPT. I use it daily for data tasks.

I would love to skip to an alternate client as some of them have some cool features, but the code executor is a must for me.

A cloud provider called modal.com offers this. Here is a sample implementation on their github https://github.com/modal-labs/devlooper

I'm looking for this as well.

Porcelain vs plumbing. What problem are you solving for?

I tried that, but the API seems to be way worse than the current gpt4 chat model.

Honestly, I find most of the value I get from copilot in VScode is it's strong autocomplete. It's really good at recognizing sequences. I generally prefer to use a web based chatbot to actually write code.

Generally though, I feel that the cost of AI is cheap relative to the value and my time is expensive and I have a bunch of different subscriptions and perplexity is currently the best for research and claude or chatgpt are the best for writing email and copilot is just awesome for coding autocompletion. I just write a comment and it writes all the code.

I didn't bother. I'd rather pay an inconsequential amount over utility billing.

One main reason: the rate doesn't change. I have no trust for tech services that like to pretend they're a real utility provider.

I need water/electric, I don't need this toy

Edit: before someone says it, yes I'm aware of limits. You miss my point, I'm not interested in this dance - I'm trying to play. A few dollars allows me to not care

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