I don't understand why people are paying $20/month for ChatGPT, that has a bunch of limitations, when you could just use an open-source chat interface like Chatbox + your GPT-4 API key?
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.
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 $20.
OpenAI does not provide access to GPT-4 32K tokens model via API. Also they have weird restriction that you don't get access to even weaker GPT-4 model unless you had paid them at least 1$ 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.
The open source solutions have mental overhead and potentially long term maintenance hassle. Even for people who could set it up, for many $20 is worth not having to deal with it.
Did they change it recently? When I got it 2 years ago you pretty much just opened an account and put in a credit card. Or you mean specifically to GTP-4? If so I think they made it generally available for everyone now https://openai.com/blog/gpt-4-api-general-availability
Probably makes economic sense for most users to go with API. On the other hand - is it worth saving a couple of dollars to even have to worry about the risk of a huge bill? (You use it way too much, you accidentally leak your key, you make a mistake when coding a UI and put it in a loop, etc).
Indeed. I believe it's even stricter than that; you actually have to request a quota increase that has to be approved in order to spend more than 120$, the default spend hard limit.
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.
Have you ever bought a packaged/frozen meal at the grocery store?
You know, if you buy the raw ingredients, you end up paying a lot less, and can even pick ingredients and spices you like more than the prepackaged mixes. The ingredients are objectively superior and you can pick a diet that fills your nutritional needs without waste or leftovers. If you meal prep, it doesn't even take significantly more time than frozen meals too.
Some people like the the certainty of knowing there is a pizza in their freezer they can toss in the oven and eat in 10 minutes, even though it would be objectively tastier, healthier, and cheaper to get into the habit of making their own.
>Today all existing API developers with a history of successful payments can access the GPT-4 API with 8K context.
My account at that time had not made any payments so it did not aplied to it.
>We plan to open up access to new developers by the end of this month, and then start raising rate-limits after that depending on compute availability.
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.