On February 1^st, OpenAI announced a new pricing model for their extremely popular and widely used ChatGPT AI. While this new subscription is only available to US-based customers, access and support is expected to be rolled out to additional countries and regions within the coming months. The new ‘ChatGPT Plus’ service will be available for $20usd per month.

The ‘Free’ ChatGPT model will still be available and accessible to everyone on the internet, but this new model will provide paying users with benefits that are not available to non-paying customers.

Availability During Peak Usage and High Demand

Have you ever wanted to use ChatGPT and seen this message?

“Chat GPT is at capacity right now. Get notified when we’re back”.

This is a common message shown when there is a high user count. ChatGPT Plus will cut this wait time and allow immediate access to the tool even during periods of high usage.

Faster Response Speeds

Responses on the platform are already mind-blowingly fast, but it looks like they will be a lot faster with Plus.

Priority Access To New Features

At this stage, we do not know what these new features will be, but it seems paying ‘Plus’ users will have priority access to these features before free users will have access. In saying this, the free tool will still be updated, but at a slower rate.

OpenAI included a statement in their press release about the future of ChatGPT promising to refine and expand their offerings based on the feedback and needs of their customer base. They announced the upcoming launch of the ChatGPT API waitlist and the ongoing work being done to explore lower cost plans, plans for businesses and data packs.

“We plan to refine and expand this offering based on your feedback and needs. We’ll also soon be launching the (ChatGPT API waitlist), and we are actively exploring options for lower-cost plans, business plans, and data packs for more availability.”

Yes. ChatGPT will remain free to use, for now. It was inevitable that the tool would introduce a paid model as the compute costs are extremely high and not sustainable to keep exclusively free.

“We will have to monetize it somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering”
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO

With the explosion of the AI Chatbot market this year, expect to see fierce competition from Google, which is developing its own chat-enhanced search product, existing AI models and newly emerging companies.