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Ask HN: Is there any value in paying for ChatGPT?

2 points by osigurdson ↗ HN
Before I started paying the $20/month fee, I was able to use ChatGPT but experienced a lot of timeouts, failures and login issues. At first the paid service mostly solved these issues. Now, I seem to experience all of the same problems despite paying. Is there any point in paying for the service at this point?

I know it provides access to ChatGPT4 but so far I generally don't bother with it because it only seems incrementally better while being much slower.

6 comments

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Walter1
If you are writing an article, being able to choose a style is very important. I believe that is not available on the free version (at least not in the pulldown. I write real estate ads with it. Without the "persuasive" style it is not nearly as good. I have rarely had to wait to get on the paid version.
osigurdson
I've never seen the option to use a style using the UI. When using the API directly, it is possible to specify system messages that influence the overall behaviour.
Quarrel
Isn't this just a function of prompting? ie you can give it the style and voice you want the reply in before asking it to do something.
Quarrel
If this is where you're at (both in terms of issues your seeing and not seeing the value in GPT4 like lots of us), then I think you probably should stick to Bing AI Chat for a while? The landscape is changing super fast, so things will be different in a few months, but for most people MS offer a decent service.

https://www.bing.com/search?q=Bing+AI&showconv=1

It does come with an Edge requirement and a MS account requirement (and I've seen reports that you can fudge the Edge requirement with the correct User Agent, but I haven't tried it).

yuppie_scum
Much cheaper to sign up for an API key then use it with MacGPT or some other client. Fraction of a cent per question.
taubek
Yes, there is. Almost no downtime compared to free version. At least to me. And ChatGPT 4 is available.