There was an engineer from OpenAI here a while ago saying that they go above and beyond to be able to offer the free access through that page. I guess they probably have to do a bunch of checks and that's starting to degrade the experience. I use chat.com a lot for quick stuff, but on my end I haven't noticed any difference whatsoever.

Edit: Found the post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47567575 (alleged engineer, I guess)

>Hey! I'm Nick, and I work on Integrity at OpenAI. These checks are part of how we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform.

>A big reason we invest in this is because we want to keep free and logged-out access available for more users. My team’s goal is to help make sure the limited GPU resources are going to real users.

>We also keep a very close eye on the user impact. We monitor things like page load time, time to first token and payload size, with a focus on reducing the overhead of these protections. For the majority of people, the impact is negligible, and only a very small percentage may see a slight delay from extra checks. We also continuously evaluate precision so we can minimize false positives while still making abuse meaningfully harder.

And your exact complaint being made 20 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47567689