Chat GPT price queries have been persistent since the free-to-try OpenAI creation gained popularity. So how much is it?
Well, OpenAI seems to be working on a tiered answer. While there are no obvious plans to stop the Chat GPT model from being free to use, it seemed that a ‘professional plan’ could be rolled out. Read on for more information
Chat GPT price plans
OpenAI’s Chat GPT is free to use, and anyone can do so. Although this access is global, it does come with some drawbacks for now.
While the company works to stabilize compute requirements with daily fluctuations of users, there will be outages. Even if there isn’t an outage, users have reported that response times from Chat GPT can sometimes be slow – presumably if it is dealing with a large number of requests.
Nonetheless, this is Chat GPT free access, and it is a lot of power and AI-based innovation to have access to for nothing.
Chat GPT Pro
Across the weekend of January 21-22, some visitors to OpenAI’s Chat GPT page spotted ‘professional plan’ pricing of $42 per month. The option was reportedly shown to some registered users and was not yet widely available.
The existence of Chat GPT Pro was proven by Zhahid Khawaja a developer who tweeted out a video of his own access to the plan. However, there have been no recent public updates on this plan from OpenAI.
It is unclear if it will continue to be rolled out as a plan, and if or when it will have a wider pool of users access it. Its benefits are impressive though, being the same as GPT Plus (below), but with reported priority access to testing new features.
Chat GPT Plus was announced at the end of January 2023 and is priced at $20 per month. At the time of writing it is available as part of a pilot plan only though, so only a select amount of users currently have access.
The subscription model was launched in the US initially, and may additionally roll out to wider regions when wider access is available. According to OpenAI, the GPT Plus subscription plan will have the following benefits:
This avoids the notice seen by users attempting access during times of heavy load: “Chat GPT is at capacity right now. Get notified when we’re back”.
Constant access for professional users and researchers makes sense and cuts out the waiting around while Chat GPT writes its own poem about why it’s currently at capacity (this actually happened for us).
Another benefit to be expected when paying for access to OpenAI’s chat model. Speeds responses to queries and prompts to Chat GPT, allowing you to be more productive in use.
At release, Chat GPT was completely free. And it still is if you want to try the model with potential limitations. However, OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, tweeted on December 5th:
“…We will have to monetize it somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering”.
That’s proven to be true as the professional and plus plans roll out. It’s not impossible that there will be additional pricing changes going forward either, as Pro and Plus options continue to be developed.
As popular and innovative as Chat GPT is, price is always a consideration. OpenAI needs to balance costs and availability with discoverability and access for those keen to test. We’ll keep an eye on the Chat GPT price going forward, and a lot of other interesting areas being opened up in the AI-powered space.
