After almost two months of free availability, ChatGPT becomes paid: there remains a free option to use the OpenAI chatbot, but there is now a subscription at 42 dollars per month to have some advantages. This is an early ChatGPT monetization method available to some users.
Faced with the success of ChatGPT around the world, OpenAI is losing a lot of money by making it available to everyone, despite restrictions on the number of users who can use it simultaneously. If we expect since its release that the artificial intelligence tool is monetized, OpenAI is setting up a subscription formula “ Professional at $42 per month, available to select users at this time.
OpenAI was thinking about monetizing ChatGPT
Until now, the monetization of ChatGPT was something of an open secret: the question was not whether ChatGPT would become paid, but when. A few days ago, OpenAI submitted a survey on its Discord server for ChatGPT users stating: “ We’re starting to think about how to monetize ChatGPT (preliminary thinking, nothing official to share yet). Our goal is to continue to improve and maintain the service, and monetization is one of the ways we are looking to ensure its long-term viability. »
In its message, OpenAI also questioned the maximum monthly price that ChatGPT users wanted to charge or for what reasons they used it. In the said questionnaire, we learned that OpenAI was experimenting with a ChatGPT Professional offer including:
- Continuous availability;
- Responses without speed limits;
- Unlimited messages (or at least twice as many as the current free version).
ChatGPT launches $42 per month subscription
As reported by James Ivings on Twitter, ChatGPT has gone paid, with a subscription saying ” professional at $42 per month, including the benefits OpenAI was considering. In addition to that, the subscription offers priority access to the new features of the tool. However, the free option used by default remains available to all users and is subject to the same current constraints: limitation of the number of simultaneous users and the speed of responses.
ChatGPT goes paid today! ?
RIP all the free tools exploiting the closed API ? pic.twitter.com/ARbDyqHIyl
— James Ivings (@JamesIvings) January 21, 2023
Beyond the debate on the price of this subscription, there is no doubt that it will be useful to some people: indeed, many Internet users point out that ChatGPT is often overloaded and that it is sometimes necessary to wait a long time before being able to access it. Access to future functionalities can also represent a competitive advantage for digital professionals: we obviously think of the connection of ChatGPT to the Internet. The tool could thus take advantage of the latest news instead of being confined to texts published before 2022.
Here’s how ChatGPT Pro works! A lot of users were asking me for proof, so I decided to make a video. pic.twitter.com/QYNn3pRnxI
— Zahid Khawaja (@chillzaza_) January 21, 2023
Another advantage: the execution speed of ChatGPT. The Verge shared AI developer Zahid Khawaja’s video demonstrating the tool’s responsiveness and it’s significantly faster than the free version. However, the media recalls that many users have expressed their dissatisfaction on the OpenAI Discord server about the price of ChatGPT Pro. We can think that the company is speculating on the price of ChatGPT to test the waters before launching more varied offers at regulated prices. It is also an opportunity to see what interest aroused by its AI tool, by adding a barrier represented by its price. Something to inform the big tech companies of the market: we know that Microsoft wants to invest 10 billion dollars in OpenAI and that Google is accelerating the pace against ChatGPT.
ChatGPT has been making headlines on every tech news site since its launch, and rightly so. This automated chat can be stunning in some of its responses. We put it to the test with several questions…
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