Ask HN: Is anyone considering cancelling their ChatGPT subscription?

I don't know why anyone pays for 4 when 3.5 is already a billion times better than what we had 2 years ago. 3.5-turbo, at least from an API perspective is an extremely cost effective way for you to add more intelligent decision making to your applications and backend processes. We're going to use GPT 3.5-turbo to help us decide if a specific thing is probably "this" or "that" or "one of the following".... Super easy to use it that way than rolling our own crappy bag-of-words neural network that uses word2vec. Tiny bit slower, but worth it.

Get an API key and an interface like MacGPT. I spend like $4 a month on tokens now.

The fact that their now 1.5k token system prompt is forced into every response makes it not worth it, even though it's "unlimited". API makes a lot more sense for most purposes.

we switched to librechat [0] it is a great app if you don't use gpt 4 often enough to hit the 20$ worth of tokens, also it supports plugins. If you use more than 20$ then just stay with gpt plus.

https://docs.librechat.ai/

Isnt ChatGPT 4 available (for free) on Bing Chat anyways?

No, the hours it saves per month are worth a lot more than $20. It really depends on your use case, personally I find it superior to any other model I've tried for coding, debugging and troubleshooting server issues.

I just use the API. It's much more cost effective and doesn't have stupid limitations of 30 gpt4 queries per 4h or what not.

Funny that you posted this, I canceled it an hour ago. If I need it, I'll use the gpt-4 api, why I cancelled it? It can't think anymore, it is arrogantly wrongly overconfident, it can't detect it's own mistakes anymore, and it has goldfish memory. For the record, it was brilliant and the best LLM ever, but now it feels like GPT2 levels of quality. It all started 2 weeks ago, when chatgpt got `silently` updated (https://chat.openai.com/share/512002b1-ceb3-48b5-9a29-d44b63...), In the beginning, it is decent, you can see towards the end there is certain gibberish (when the update happened). When creating a new chat, the quality seriously went down. I am looking for replacements, not sure where everyone went, what are they using nowadays?

To avoid both instability and strict limitations, you can utilize the ChatGPT API. By adding the API key into clients like MindMac[0], you will gain access to a pleasant UI with numerous additional features.

[0] https://mindmac.app

works great for me

Currently my employer pays for it and it saves me some time, so it’s fair and good enough.

But Id never pay it myself, it’s not worth it with current quality.

I used to love it, but it's getting on my nerves with all the politically correct BS.

I was trying to translate a little text and it refused because it cointaned a part that violated their terms. wth.

Unstable due to what? Network error? Or the model itself providing bad results?

If it's about model output, I highly recommend custom GPTs. Taking 15 minutes to an hour to play around with a custom prompt to get it to work how you want is incredibly worth it.

I've cancelled long ago. Tried it for 2 months but was a hassle to have to use over VPN as OpenAI is too afraid of Hong Kong and banned us. So, yea no. Not going to pay money for that.

I have a console based chat app I built for myself that calls GPT-4 via the API. It works pretty well and is not very expensive.

I use a fork of https://github.com/Krivich/GPT-Over-API, I edited it to support recent models and added cost estimation that keeps track of all the money spent on all requests. For most of the tasks ChatGPT3.5 is fine, but for more complex/recent-data related tasks, GPT-4 performs better. Why this over some fancy ui on the web? Well, this can be hosted locally and will not steal your OpenAI key, and it allows to set max.tokens and select history items on every request.

I canceled mine and I now pay for Gemini. Only thing I really use it for is brainstorming and coding and it’s better for me at both those by a long shot.

Yes, it’s worse in all ways from when I first signed up. Poorer quality responses and it’s dog slow.

Cancelled this month.

I started getting too many responses which were clearly incorrect, I point out the correction to which the response was, "You are indeed correct [rephrases the answer correctly]"

Okay, great, but what about all the responses where I don't actually know the topic enough to know it's incorrect?

I'm considering switching to Gemini when the mobile app is available in my country and the web app gets better.

ChatGPT lately has its confidence really high and hallucinates in the middle of really basic technical stuff. It will say what a command should be for something really mundane like the `ip` command in Linux and then it sprinkles stuff that doesn't exist in the middle... you start to lose confidence.

I think LLMs are better than search engines but if I have to fact check everything, I'll switch to another LLM or go back to a search engine.

I don't know what has changed in ChatGPT but it's worse lately.

How are people using GPT4 via the API? I signed up and loaded some money, but I still can’t use GPT for by the API. Only 3.5 turbo.

I still find ChatGPT 4 well worth the money. The coding is way better than 3.5. I wonder what their system prompt is, I don’t get as good results from the API (maybe I am doing it wrong).

Many of my customers canceled their ChatGPT subscription and switched 100% to API.

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 or other open-source models via

Depends on the applications, you can also get these:

- Access to multiple AI services: OpenAI, Azure or OpenRouter

- Local LLMs via Ollama etc.

- 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 ...

-You can even use local LLMs if your machine can run Ollama

- 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

Nope. I use it more than Google now. Most amazing piece of software I've ever used by a country mile.

The past few weeks ChatGPT's response hangs about 80% of the time for any query I make and I need to refresh the page. Has anyone else had this experience?

Yes but I can’t figure out why. It’s insanely useful and can do so many things but I’m just not using it lately.

It kind of reminds me of my quest vr.