HACKER Q&A
📣 osigurdson

Is there any value in paying for ChatGPT?


Before I started paying the $20/month fee, I was able to use ChatGPT but experienced a lot of timeouts, failures and login issues. At first the paid service mostly solved these issues. Now, I seem to experience all of the same problems despite paying. Is there any point in paying for the service at this point?

I know it provides access to ChatGPT4 but so far I generally don't bother with it because it only seems incrementally better while being much slower.


  👤 Quarrel Accepted Answer ✓
If this is where you're at (both in terms of issues your seeing and not seeing the value in GPT4 like lots of us), then I think you probably should stick to Bing AI Chat for a while? The landscape is changing super fast, so things will be different in a few months, but for most people MS offer a decent service.

https://www.bing.com/search?q=Bing+AI&showconv=1

It does come with an Edge requirement and a MS account requirement (and I've seen reports that you can fudge the Edge requirement with the correct User Agent, but I haven't tried it).


👤 Walter1
If you are writing an article, being able to choose a style is very important. I believe that is not available on the free version (at least not in the pulldown. I write real estate ads with it. Without the "persuasive" style it is not nearly as good. I have rarely had to wait to get on the paid version.

👤 yuppie_scum
Much cheaper to sign up for an API key then use it with MacGPT or some other client. Fraction of a cent per question.

👤 taubek
Yes, there is. Almost no downtime compared to free version. At least to me. And ChatGPT 4 is available.