Ask HN: Should I subscribe to ChatGPT Plus if we can get it for free on Bing?
Apparently I can get access to GPT-4 for free through Bing[1]. So is it worth it to pay $20 for GPT-4 for personal use? Is the API really that much better than using it through Bing?
[1] https://www.kdnuggets.com/2023/05/3-ways-access-gpt4-free.html
89 comments
[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadLike I said though, I haven't used it recently. I've added a custom prompt to chatgpt to only search the web when necessary, if it can't provide a good answer otherwise; if you can now do something similar with Bing chat, and it respects it, maybe it will work fine. (Though when I did try it a while back, I found it more restricted in general; the web searching was just the most obvious thing.)
I would prefer the free ChatGPT 3.5 over what I get on Bing because Bing counts down the responses and tends to give much shorter answers.
Here is an example for Bing Chat vs ChatGPT Plus: https://dropover.cloud/4e1dd7
If you don't plan to use it enough to worth $20 a month, you can purchase some API credits from OpenAI which don't expire and use it directly from their developer playground.
Actually, IIRC they will give you some free credit valid for some time when you create an account on their developer platform so you should be able to give it a try yourself.
Go to: https://platform.openai.com
Create a new free account, then head to the http://platform.openai.com/playground and try out ChatGPT with GPT-4(might be unavailable on free credit until you top-up some money) on their Chat interface.
If the GPT-4 options don't appear, maybe they don't give them to non-paying users? If that's the case, you can add something like 5$ credit to your account.
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8264644-what-is-prepaid-...
Or via https://github.com/yakGPT/yakGPT
It's a _lot_ cheaper unless you use it really heavily. I've yet to break $10/month (+taxes)
You host the bot yourself so nobody else can see what you're doing.
I can also bring it to the front with a hotkey and start typing a question, it's easy to switch between GPT3.5, 4 and Dall-E. You can also give it different pre-prompts from a quick menu etc.
I found the Playground and the OpenAI web UI just janky enough so that I started looking for a proper application.
Got it on Black Friday sale, when it was 55% off or something.
It’s a separate thing to the $20/month chatgpt plus subscription.
Bing really feels like a different GPT 4 — tuned for brevity and to reduce resource utilization. (Except for images. Bing wants to generate images for no reason, while chatGPT sometimes double checks to make sure you really want one, and has scaled back the number of simultaneous variants it generated from 4 to 1, although no limit that I’ve reached yet.)
Bing has a max turns per chat limit I think around 20 or 25 at the moment, at least with the purple (formerly “Creative”) GPT 4 model. ChatGPT doesn’t have conversation limits, although older text falls out of context. Bing created that limit to prevent the model from going unhinged after too many turns, which happened frequently with Bing but almost never with ChatGPT for some reason.
I’ve also hit a daily limit on Bing while not on chatGPT+ — chatGPT4 currently has a 30 turn limit within 3 hours, although I’ve rarely hit that outside of long voice chats. I do try to cram multiple questions into one go, to conserve turns though. Or I give certain tasks like summaries to chatgpt3.5 as it’s faster with no quota.
Plugins were briefly interesting. Maybe the new custom GPTs will become a must, but not yet. Oh, and the python runtime environment is epic. It can literally build its own tools to answer questions.
If I couldn’t afford $20 a month, I could maybe make do with Bing, but if I could afford it, I think chatGPT is very worth it.
You mentioned the API, which is a whole different thing than the $20/mo chatGPT subscription. It’s usage based, and designed to allow you to integrate GPT into other software and services. It has different models and different pricing tiers. I use both chatGPT and the API, though the API I use only lightly for personal use and it hasn’t consumed my first $5 deposit yet. There are also chatGPT like third party clients that take an API key and act like chatGPT and depending on your usage may cost less or more than the normal chatGPT subscription.
It’s something similar on the web
So, no, it's no longer worth it. At least not until they free up resources for paying customers by moving those useless, resource-consuming toys somewhere else.
If you want to use GPTs or to generate images with Dall-E then ChatGPT Plus is a no brainer I guess.
But if your focus is on GPT-4 then I highly recommend to use an API instead.
There are multiple pros of using an API Key:
- You pay for your usages. I've been using API Key exclusively and most of the time, it cost me around $5-$10 a month
- Your data is not used for training. This is important for a privacy-minded user like me. Though you can disable this in ChatGPT (but you will lose chat history)
- No message limit. Though there are rate limits to prevent abuse but generally, you do not have the message limit like the ChatGPT
- You can choose previous GPT models. In my experience, `gpt-4-0314` was the peak gpt-4 model.
Depends on the applications, you can also get these:
- Access to multiple AI services: OpenAI, Azure or OpenRouter
- Build custom AI workflows
- Voice search & text-to-speech etc.
- Deeper integrations with other apps & services
There are also a few cons:
- No GPTs support yet
- If you use Dall E a lot then ChatGPT plus is more affordable. Generating images using Dall E API can be quite expensive
Edit: Some tips when using an API Key:
- You pay for tokens used (basically how long your question & AI's answers). The price per chat message is not expensive, but usually you will need to send the whole conversation to OpenAI, which makes it expensive. Make sure to pick an app that allows you to limit the chat context.
- Don't use GPT-4 for tasks that doesn't require deeper reasoning capabilities. I find that GPT-3.5 turbo is still very good at simple tasks like: grammar fixes, improve your writing, translations ...
- Use different system prompts for different tasks: for example, I have a special prompt for coding tasks, and a different system prompt for writing tasks. It usually give a much better result.
Shameless plug: I've been building a native ChatGPT app for Mac called BoltAI[0], give it a try
[0]: https://boltai.com
Secondly, all requests are sent directly to OpenAI servers. There is absolutely no middle/proxy server.
There is however a proxy server for Claude but this was due to a technical difficulty and user can host their own proxy server instead.
If you are looking for an alternative of the app for the ChatGPT - I would suggest https://www.typingmind.com I have been using it since it was released. It is also available with Setapp subscription, which gives you some free usage of the OpenAI with Setapp embedded API key.
> A perpetual fallback license is a license that allows you to use a specific version of software without an active subscription for it. The license also includes all bugfix updates, more specifically in X.Y.Z version all Z releases are included.
After 1 year, you can continue to use the app without having to upgrade. You won't receive new features, but will continue to receive bug fixes for the features released previously.
So I can argue it's not "subscription".
Plus, renewal cost 50% less, so it's not $40-$80 a year, but only $20-$40 a year after the first year.
And lastly, the app fetch model lists from OpenAI API so there is no need to "support new models".
I believe this is a sustainable pricing model for an indie developer like me. And I believe it's fair for everyone.
[0]: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
As an Indie developer myself I do not support subscription based licensing (or your version of license) for B2C products. You can offer B2B subscription based licensing, but B2C should always be perpetual licenses. Sure it is ok to ask for the upgrade to new version, which has significant features.
And to clarify, we are talking about the product that does not have any outgoing server spending.
That is my opinion.
No, I am not. The "technical" part here is the "fallback" in "perpetual fallback license".
Appreciate your opinion and I'm sure many think the same way.
But selling perpetual licenses just won't work for me. It's not sustainable, especially for this kind of app.
I don’t see a reason for an indie developer to charge subscription, if there is no server cost. New versions should just make the app interesting for more users, so the income should be flowing constantly every month.
Anyway, I just personally don’t support subscription based apps and never will.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230522013022/https://boltai.ap...
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230711214004/https://mindmac.a...
> Is my data protected? Absolutely. BoltAI operates locally on your device, and no user input or prompts are stored or sent to us.
While the explanation might be true, as far as I understand it, you can’t assert that users’ data is “absolutely” protected, because it fundamentally depends on OpenAI to keep your users’ data safe too, which you can’t control.
I would guess most of your audience would understand this anyway, but I would be careful as potentially someone could sue you in case OpenAI had a data breach or something.
When you have made that choice is it still possible to use 'browse the web' or 'talk to a PDF' like functionality? If so, what would be the best way to do it?
My app (BoltAI) does support web search (via Google Search) and web browsing (built-in) but not chat w/ PDF functionality.
I built another app[0] specifically for that use case.
So I guess if you need an all-in-one kind of functionality then ChatGPT could be a better choice.
[0]: https://pdfpals.com
That's interesting. Why do you say that? And where can we access the model from?
If you use API Key then you can change the model parameter. Here is the list of models that OpenAI support: https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/gpt-4-and-gpt-4-turb...
Too bad it’s considered legacy model and will be deprecated next year.
[0] https://github.com/danny-avila/librechat
Was also recently discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38502805
Only Precise and Creative modes use GPT-4
https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1732495030143549541
Also see:
An Opinionated Guide to Which AI to Use: ChatGPT Anniversary Edition
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/an-opinionated-guide-to-whi...
I always object when someone tells me "it's (only) X $ / Y $" and I know for me the relevant part that I want to say out loud is per month, as in, it's a subscription, not a one-time or prepaid amount. I've rid myself of all subscriptions to the degree feasible because whether it's 'little' or 'much' it is recurring, per month so there will likely come a point in the future where I'll just pay without really using that thing anymore or where I forget or can't pay or where I have to pay although that sum could better be spent elsewhere. This is my experience with all subscriptions. I'm even getting my cooking gas as 'prepaid' (i.e. I buy bottles) and I wish I could do the same with electricity and so on.
So I'm totally fine with getting a gift card or whatever you call those thingies in the supermarket where you can throw a lump (20€, 50€) at some provider (Google Play, whatever) and then get to eat up that amount (over the course of at least one year, hopefully). By comparison, I wouldn't sign up even for 1€/month even tho I might get the same for 'less' money—it won't be less, and when you listen to Marie Myers (HP CFO, [1]), corporate knows darn well this is so.
* [1](https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/04/hp_printer_lockin/)
An EVEN better way, albeit more complex, is to amortize costs for comparison. This basically means figuring out what the entire cost of the thing is from beginning to end and then using that as a comparison to other stuff. This is where subscriptions get us - 15 years in, the amount of money I've paid to Netflix (even as the quality of the programming seems to have eroded) feels a little crazy.
Thinking about amortized costs when you have a little bit of cash in the bank or access to cheap credit is when finance starts to get interesting. Let's say you know you're going to need something for the next 10 years. Instead of paying the regular monthly price, what kind of discount can you get if you offer to pay cash up front for 1 year or 10 years? You'd be surprised how much people can be willing to lower the price of something for a large enough chunk of cash up front. For example if you live in a weak property market this can be a good way to rent for very cheap.
At the very least, the end of the year is a great time to look back at what you spent and ask, am I happy with spending $XXX or $XXXX on that again in 2024?
Is Netflix worth $20/mo becomes equivalent to is Netflix worth $8000, and you can just examine the alternative ways you could use that capital (e.g. buying a few thousand used movies and building your own collection which you can share with friends and family instead).
Naturally I have very few "subscriptions". I do back up data to glacier for now, but plan to switch that to off-site back ups at my mom's/MIL's.
> I wish I could do the same with electricity and so on
If you are using e.g. wood pellets for heating you essentially can.
or solar but I can't do that where I live
Gas and electricity do have small fixed components (“hookup fees”) but for the most part these aren’t strictly subscriptions since you pay for what you use.
> So I'm totally fine with getting a gift card or whatever you call those thingies in the supermarket where you can throw a lump (20€, 50€) at some provider (Google Play, whatever) and then get to eat up that amount (over the course of at least one year, hopefully).
So you are okay with subscriptions as long as they won’t charge you more than X? You might like privacy.com. They let you create credit cards with unique codes and defined spending limits. You don’t need to worry about cancelling anything since your billing just won’t go through after a certain amount is spent.
No, most definitely not. I'm not talking about the sum (although we have to talk about it too), I'm talking about the recurrent obligation.
> for the most part these aren’t strictly subscriptions since you pay for what you use
which is where the obligation comes in. I prefer setups where I show up with a sum of cash in my hands and I can go home and use up whatever I bought. The utilities have an idea about what I might be using going forward so they set a price point for me to pay up for; each year there's a round of reckoning where I get back money or have to pay extra (Ukraine War -> both gas and electricity get more expensive), and they set a new price point for me. I cannot influence that in any meaningful way; should prices soar, I'm left with swallowing it or terminate the contract altogether. I could live by candle light (in theory) and use computers with a hand crank and battery setup (in theory), but I cannot save energy now and be the master of my expenses, now. When I was a kid we did have an electricity gauge with a coin slot in the vacation apartment but that's fifty years ago. Something like that would be great. I manage to use my phone like that, and my cooking gas; now that we all must have smart meters, I want the same for electricity too. Toss a coin, get some light, stay out of subscription, great.
$20 a month is enough of a commitment in the developed world to sting just a bit on something you're not even sure you'll use much - but $20 once, as an exploratory measure, is a much easier proposition to justify.