So I caved. Last Wednesday I got the email saying my ChatGPT Plus waitlist spot was ready, and twenty bucks later I'm now a paying customer of a chatbot. Twenty dollars a month, US-only for now, and the pitch is basically: you get in even when the free version is capped out during peak hours, responses come back faster, and you get first dibs on whatever OpenAI ships next. That's it. That's the whole pitch.
I want to be upfront that I almost didn't sign up. I've been using the free version since December like everyone else on my Twitter timeline, and my main complaint with it was never speed, it was that half the time in the evening you'd get the "we're at capacity" message and just... couldn't use it. Which, fine, it's free, I'm not owed anything. But it made the tool feel unreliable for anything you actually wanted to depend on, like debugging something at 9pm instead of reading Stack Overflow answers from 2014 that don't apply to your version of anything anymore.
What I've actually used it for this week
Not glamorous stuff. I had it write me a quick bash script to batch-rename a folder of photos from my phone's default IMG_2847.jpg naming scheme into something with actual dates in the filename. It got about 90% of the way there on the first try and then hallucinated a flag for mv that doesn't exist, which I only caught because the script errored out immediately. Small thing, but it's a good reminder that you still have to read what it gives you instead of pasting and running blind. I also used it to argue with myself about restructuring a paragraph in a draft post that's been sitting half-finished since January, which worked better than I expected, honestly.
The interesting part isn't really the tool though, it's watching how fast this whole space is moving right now. Microsoft's been teasing something with Bing all week and the tech press has basically lost its mind over it, wall to wall coverage, every outlet running some variation of the same "search is about to change forever" headline. I'm not going to rehash all that here because by the time you read this you've probably seen it fifteen times already from fifteen other blogs. I'll just say I'll believe search actually changes when I see it outside a staged demo.
The part that bugs me
Twenty dollars a month is not nothing, and there's no indication yet what happens to that price once the novelty wears off. I run this blog on hosting that costs less than that per month, for context (I moved everything over to Tricknowtech a while back and it's genuinely cheaper than my old setup, if you're curious). So paying the same amount for access to a chat window feels a little steep when I stop and think about it in those terms. There's also no API pricing news yet for the general public beyond what developers already had access to on the completion models, and I have a nagging feeling that once this thing scales up, whatever comes next in terms of cost is not going to trend downward.
I don't think I'll keep the subscription past this month unless something changes. Not because it's bad, it genuinely is a little faster and I haven't hit a capacity wall once since subscribing, but because for what I actually use it for, the free tier's occasional slowness isn't twenty dollars worth of annoying. I know that's not the exciting take everyone wants right now when it feels like the entire industry is repositioning itself around chat interfaces overnight. But I've been doing this blog long enough (eleven years and change now, which is a genuinely unsettling number to type out) to have watched a lot of "this changes everything" tools quietly become "this is a decent feature inside something else" a year later.
Ask me again in March. I might be eating these words, especially if OpenAI or anyone else ships something that actually earns the subscription instead of just removing a limitation the free version imposed on purpose.