So OpenAI finally did the thing everyone assumed was coming: today they announced ChatGPT Plus, a $20/month subscription tier for the chatbot that's been eating everyone's lunch since late November. US users only for now, "pilot" is the word they're using, which I assume means they're testing whether people will actually pay before they roll it out everywhere else.
For your twenty bucks you get: access even when the free version is capacity-limited (and it has been, constantly. I've hit the "we're at capacity right now" wall more times this week than I'd like to admit), faster response times, and priority access to new features and improvements. That's it. That's the pitch. Not a new model, not extra capabilities, just a faster lane and a guarantee you can get in the door.
I keep going back and forth on whether that's reasonable or a little cheeky. On one hand, running these models isn't free, GPU time costs real money, and I get why they need a revenue line that isn't "hope Microsoft keeps writing checks." On the other hand, twenty dollars a month is Netflix money, it's Spotify money, and paying it for what's functionally a queue-skip feels a bit like the airline charging you for boarding group A. I don't think I'm rushing to pull my card out for this one, at least not yet. Maybe once they add the plugin stuff people keep speculating about, or if it starts writing better code than it currently does (it's decent, not magic, and confidently wrong about library versions more often than I'd like).
Funny timing too, because Samsung had their Unpacked event today as well, same day, over in San Francisco, and they announced the Galaxy S23 lineup — S23, S23+, and the S23 Ultra with that absurd 200-megapixel camera sensor. Starting at $799 for the base model, $1,199 if you want the Ultra with the S Pen built in. I had the livestream running in a background tab while I was eating lunch and half paying attention, and it was a weird split-screen kind of day in my head: one company asking for twenty bucks a month to talk to a chatbot, another asking twelve hundred dollars up front for a phone that can allegedly photograph the moon. Two completely different theories of how you get money out of a tech nerd in 2023, running on the same afternoon.
Anyway. Back to the ChatGPT thing, because that's the one I actually think matters more long term. What strikes me is how fast this moved. The research preview went up at the very end of November, and by the start of February they're already monetizing it directly instead of just letting the hype simmer. Usually these companies let a free tool marinate for a year or two before they start charging for it — see basically every SaaS product ever, the classic "get everyone hooked, then paywall the good stuff" playbook. OpenAI skipped a bunch of that. I don't know if that's confidence in the product or just Microsoft wanting to see a receipt after that multibillion dollar investment they announced a couple weeks back. Probably some of both.
One small complaint while I'm here: the free tier is going to get worse now, isn't it. Not officially, nobody's going to say "we're nerfing the free version," but when there's a paid lane that promises priority access during high traffic, guess which lane doesn't get priority. I've been using the free version daily for random stuff, mostly for wrangling regex I'm too lazy to write by hand and for arguing with it about semicolons in JavaScript (it has opinions, none of them consistent), and I'll be annoyed if it starts feeling like the coach seats on a plane that's overbooked the exit rows.
I'll probably try the paid tier eventually just to see what "not capacity limited" actually feels like day to day, because right now some evenings it's basically unusable, everyone else in the country apparently also wanting to ask a robot to write their emails at 9pm. Whether I keep paying past the first month is a different question entirely. Ask me in March.