How to Sign Up for ChatGPT Professional Waitlist
OpenAI starts the process of turning ChatGPT into a revenue-producing product
Five days after ChatGPT’s launch, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was asked if the service would “be FREE forever.” His response was that monetization would be required at some point because the costs were “eye-watering.” Elon Musk jumped into the Tweet thread asking for clarification on the cost per chat. Altman said they didn’t know for sure but probably the range of “single-digit cents per chat.”
Some people think that the cost of a Google search is $0.000034. That means a ChatGPT session might be as much as 1,000 to 3,000 times as expensive as a single Google search. Granted, that might only be the electricity cost to Google. There are surely other costs. Still, this offers a comparison of what OpenAI is dealing with. Traditional search is far less expensive to provision than chat conversations powered by large language models (LLM).
It’s a good thing that ChatGPT only has a few million users. You must always be careful that your demonstration product or loss leader doesn’t bankrupt you before revenue materializes.
Apply for Early Access to ChatGPT Professional
OpenAI announced a new user survey about a future ChatGPT professional edition and waitlist signup Monday in its Discord server. The survey questions range from asking how you intend to employ the service to what pricing you think would be too high or a bargain. It also asks how disappointed you would be if you no longer had access to ChatGPT.
The important thing to know is at some point, ChatGPT will no longer be free. In fact, it may soon only be accessible to a small group of beta users. There is no guarantee you will be selected for the ChatGPT professional beta program. So, you might want to get your use in now before the service gets pulled back behind the curtain. Also, apply to be part of the beta program if you want uninterrupted access. Be advised that the beta program will require a monthly subscription fee.
What to Expect
The program is expected to come with several benefits, along with the monthly fee. OpenAI suggests that the program is still in development, but you can expect it to always be available, process your requests faster, and provide essentially unlimited daily use. Availability has been a particular problem at times due to ChatGPT’s popularity.
This makes sense that paying users will get access to a higher performance system. Whether OpenAI can promise this because it is going to remove all of those pesky free users that are putting too much load on the system or in some other way is unclear. However, these performance features would seem to be table stakes for a paid solution.
Is ChatGPT Worth Paying For?
It will be interesting to see how many people will be willing to pay for ChatGPT. It is definitely more than a novelty. It has immediate application to a variety of use cases. A great example was highlighted yesterday in Synthedia. The discount wireless carrier Mint Mobile used it to write ad copy for a new commercial the company posted on YouTube. Many other people are using it for writing blog posts and even college essays (oops!).
However, I suspect most ChatGPT users today are tinkerers. They want to play with the service at the bargain price of free. A much smaller number of these users will pay. That is a certainty. However, it doesn’t need to be a big number to make a difference.
There is little chance that ChatGPT will carry a price tag below $10 per month. I also think it is unlikely to cost more than $50 per month because you can get a reasonable facsimile of ChatGPT with a lot more features from a company like Jasper AI for $40-$80 per month.
ChatGPT had a million users in five days. Let’s say that number grew to several million, but most of those people were tourists, checked it out, had a story to tell their friends, and moved on. There are about 1.5 million in OpenAI’s Discord server. These would seem to be more committed users. So, let’s say 5% of 1.5 million are willing to pay $20 per month for access to ChatGPT. That’s $18 million in annual recurring revenue. For a company that last year only generated in the low tens of millions of dollars, it is meaningful.
Then there is the consideration that Jasper AI reportedly generated $80 million in 2022 revenue by repacking OpenAI’s GPT-3. That is the revenue of just one company. There is definitely a market here, and $18 million is a small fraction of what it could be. At the very least, this would likely cover OpenAI’s costs for operating ChatGPT. At $0.05 per chat, a $20 per month user could conduct 400 chat sessions per month or 13 per day before OpenAI was incurring uncovered variable costs.
So, charging users is probably worthwhile for OpenAI, but what about you? It depends on what you want to use it for. There are many services today that connect to the GPT-3.5 Davinci-003 model API that powers ChatGPT. They are not exactly ChatGPT which has custom fine-tuning. However, these alternatives are using the same core technology and have their own fine-tuning which may be better for your needs.
In addition, many of those companies offer many more features than ChatGPT ranging from collaboration and workflow to templates and user training. You might find those services are even better than your ChatGPT experience, particularly when you move from tinkering to applying the technology to daily work.
How Will This Impact GPT-3 Partners
The other question this move raises is whether OpenAI is now openly competing with its GPT-3 API customers. If OpenAI siphons hundreds of thousands of paying users from the market, it could undermine their customers’ ability to drive growth. Can you say “channel conflict?”
Today, ChatGPT is helping drive more awareness of the value of applications built on top of LLMs. That may be driving faster growth of software companies using OpenAI’s GPT-3 API. Jasper AI’s president Shane Orlick told me in a podcast interview this week he thought that was the case for his company. They just booked their highest days for user signups in the company’s history.
If OpenAI starts competing directly with these customers, I expect them to start looking for alternative LLM technology providers. That doesn’t mean they will abandon OpenAI, but the potential competitive situation will surely motivate them to ensure they have options. Companies such as AI21 and Google may be beneficiaries of that shift.
Let me know what you think. Will you be signing up for a paid ChatGPT account?
The sign-up site also doesn't mention if ChatGPT's knowledge will still limited to 2021 data.