Why does anyone pay for ChatGPT Plus?

I'm surprised nobody is mentioning one of the largest factors. If you're a heavy user of chatGPT, the equivalent cost of using the smallest GPT4 model would run you a hell of a lot more.

The cost of the GPT-4 API is ballpark around $0.05 / 1000 tokens. If you want to include a rolling context window, you will easily hit 1000+ tokens if not a huge amount more. ChatGPT pro gives you 50 GPT-4 queries every three hours. If you're using it all day you might average about 100 daily queries. Using a dedicated GPT4 API would run you approximately five dollars a day for the same thing - that's $150 a month as opposed to flat cost of $20.

Lots of reasons.

Brand. People prefer things they’re familiar with and things that people they personally know also use, they intuitively feel that they’re less likely to have a bad experience with those. And that’s generally true. Many more people have friends who use chatgpt plus than have friends who use the gpt playground or an open source ui.

Fixed fee will be preferable for some. The risk of it being unexpectedly high may outweigh the benefit of an average lower cost.

Access to plugins plus the official iOS app.

The biggest reason is the familiarity with the brand and because they’ve heard of chatgpt plus from many places, but they haven’t heard of these other options. Plus for most people, the idea of getting an api key and all of that is going to be a little intimidating.

Overall, if it was any family member of mine I’d recommend that they used chatgpt plus rather than getting an api key.

Personally I use the gpt playground, but I also recognize that to 99% of gpt users that’s inferior, even though I significantly prefer it myself.

OpenAI does not provide access to GPT-4 32K tokens model via API. Also they have weird restriction that you don't get access to even weaker GPT-4 model unless you had paid them at least 1$ before for API usage. They API prices are quite cheap, so I have to artificially generate lot of requests to them against GPT-3, so that I can pay them 1$, so that I get access to GPT-4. As far as I understand, this is the way to go currently.

I do, I generally don't trust utility billing. I'm not running a service here, I just want to ask Jarvis some stuff

The open source solutions have mental overhead and potentially long term maintenance hassle. Even for people who could set it up, for many $20 is worth not having to deal with it.

It is a total clusterfuck how you even get access to the API. So people pay because they want a convenient way to get access to GPT-4.

Probably makes economic sense for most users to go with API. On the other hand - is it worth saving a couple of dollars to even have to worry about the risk of a huge bill? (You use it way too much, you accidentally leak your key, you make a mistake when coding a UI and put it in a loop, etc).

Access to GPT 4 (have not got access yet to GPT 4 with API). Access to extensions (I use webpage summarization extension one time extensively)

Easy, with so many stories of people getting bills for absurd amounts when using usage based pricing, I rather pay slightly more but a fixed amount and have one less thing to worry about.

Can you just sign up for gpt 4 apis? I was under the impression it was wait listed.

99% of people don't even know what's an API key.

Anyone like my grandma?

$20 is a flat rate. How much would I spend on the API?

Convenience and access to plugins such as wolfram alpha.

Convenience.