Last year when I first reviewed ChatGPT, the most well-known AI chatbot in the world, I felt that most people shouldn't pay for it. A year later, I still believe that casual users are fine using the free version. However, OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has rolled out a slew of updates and improvements making it the $20 per month. That's especially true if you're increasingly using it for research or for parsing through large amounts of data.
OpenAI now gives paid ChatGPT users access to the o1 and o3 reasoning models, advanced voice mode, better memory capabilities and a powerful coding agent. At the same time, OpenAI lowered token limits for more input and output text, which subsequently lets paid users generate additional images. Subscribers to the paid plan also get faster priority for image generation and keep full access to the latest models, whereas free users could be downgraded to lower models if servers are busy.
Free users have seen some upgrades as well. The GPT-4 model was sunset for GPT-4o in April, meaning ChatGPT will no longer downgrade itself to the now-retired GPT-4 model when usage is high. Free users also get some imaging capabilities, although they don't get priority queue. There's also ChatGPT Search, new shopping tools and light memory capabilities available for free.
ChatGPT offers a lot despite not costing you anything. If you're an occasional AI user, just looking to spruce up emails, do some light research or generate an image, then there's no major need to upgrade. But if you find yourself hitting walls consistently, where waiting three hours for your tokens to reset becomes unbearable, then it's probably time to consider making the upgrade.
Here are four major questions that will help you figure out whether the paid version of ChatGPT is worth $20 per month.
How patient are you?
Waiting is the biggest differentiating factor between the free and paid versions of ChatGPT. OpenAI obviously wants users forking over some cash and does so by sprinkling a little inconveniences to free users. Like with free mobile games, you can be left waiting for hours before you're allowed to continue, unless you pay extra to get a fast pass.
When you hit a rate limit after using ChatGPT a lot, you'll most often be asked to wait three hours. I've found that image generation is often the main culprit for suddenly running out of tokens and being asked to wait. On the other hand, for many other uses that didn't involve images, I found ChartGPT free rarely asked me to wait.
When doing research, for example, I found it nearly impossible to get ChatGPT Free to kick me out. It seems that lower-level inquiries don't trigger token limits as easily. Unfortunately, OpenAI doesn't broadcast the exact amount of tokens given to free or paid users, so it's hard to do a numbers-by-numbers comparison.
Creative inquiries, ones that take ChatGPT Free more time to compute, might eat away at your tokens faster, but I honestly still found it difficult to hit those limits. The writing quality did come off as a bit basic or with as much bravado and grammatical complexity as a young adult novel, but for a tool that costs no money, it's a good jumping off point, nonetheless.
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