ChatGPT Plus Will be $20 and Available in a Few Weeks
ChatGPT also got a "factuality" upgrade
OpenAI officially announced ChatGPT Plus earlier today. A blog by the company said the service will be $20 per month and “subscribers will receive a number of benefits,” including:
General access to ChatGPT, even during peak times
Faster response times
Priority access to new features and improvements
The expected feature set has not changed since OpenAI said it was evaluating a potential product and solicited input from users. However, the pricing is half of the inadvertent preview that cropped up a couple of weeks ago.
A Clever Trial Baloon?
I noted last month that $42 seemed suspiciously like a meme reference around the meaning of life. It appears someone put that figure in as a joke when testing the payment system, and it was never supposed to be seen publicly. Granted, the reaction to the $42 price tag probably offered OpenAI more information about market receptivity than their survey questions ever could.
Many people were okay with the price, while a hoard of others was not. Before the fake reveal, some people were probably thinking it would be $10 per month or something in that range. The $42 price tag likely seemed super high at 2-4x expectations. Depending on your reaction to the $42 “anchor price,” you are now likely to view a $20 figure as reasonable or cheap!
I doubt this was intentional, but it is a known technique for testing price reaction and influencing how a set price is received.
Is it Worth it?
Keep in mind that ChatGPT Plus is not likely to offer unlimited use, and the features are going to be slim at the beginning. The convenience of priority access and faster response will appeal to many people, particularly business users. I am most interested in “priority access to new features.” OpenAI is a pioneer in these markets, and these features are likely to come out before similar capabilities are offered by the GPT-3 API users.
However, I wrote last month that there are options people will have to consider as they start to pull out their credit cards.
Another consideration is that ChatGPT does not exist in a market vacuum. There are other AI writing assistants that have direct access to the davinci-003 model for GPT-3.5 that powers ChatGPT. They don’t have the same fine-tuning as the ChatGPT service, but they may have better fine-tuning for specific use cases. These other services offer more features than ChatGPT today and already have pricing that can be compared to the new Pro plan from OpenAI.
The starter package for Jasper AI is $40 per month for 35,000 words, and it has many more features. Plus, there is an upgrade path to even more features and higher word counts. Copy.ai charges $49 per month for more features than ChatGPT and unlimited words per month. Wordtune has plans that begin at $10 per month with an entirely different set of features that are more appropriate for many use cases.
At $20 per month, the tradeoff may be more attractive for ChatGPT Plus. A key variable to look for is the usage limits by day or tokens. That will ultimately be a big factor for heavy users.
In addition, users will have to decide whether paying for ChatGPT is worth the money when OpenAI says it plans to continue offering a free version. The blog post today said:
We love our free users and will continue to offer free access to ChatGPT. By offering this subscription pricing, we will be able to help support free access availability to as many people as possible.
ChatGPT Upgrades
OpenAI has also been making upgrades to the service since its launch on November 30th. Just this week, a pop-up announced that ChatGPT now has improved “factuality and mathematical capabilities.” These are notable deficiencies in ChatGPT, and any improvement is certainly welcome news.
OpenAI also recently added a “Stop Generating” button to the interface. This is in response to many people saying the responses were too wordy and took too long to generate. Since there was no way to “interrupt” or “barge in” while ChatGPT was droning on, this is also a favorable user experience upgrade.
It will be interesting to see how the ability to handle math has improved. This is not a core competency of large language models. Some recent demonstrations with Wolfram Alpha show the benefit of adding explicit math capabilities and access to structured data sources.
So, are you going to sign up for ChatGPT Plus? Let me know in the comments below or on LinkedIn.
Yes, $20/MO is attractive, especially if you run your entire content business on ChatGPT or other AI tools. I am in no hurry to fill in the card details as yet because am still learning to work with ChatGPT and other AI tools, about which I have learnt from your newsletter. Once the excitement dies down and some processing of the learning kicks in, I will decide whether to pay for ChatGPT+. Consequently, if I run a thriving content wiriting business, I would not hesitate to buy the plus service.