Quick one, mostly for future me.

I’ve been hooked on ChatGPT since it came out in November. I tried GitHub Copilot last summer and had been messing around with the API models on and off before that, so it was inevitable, but I’m still blown away just like everyone else. pure fun. The problem is everyone else got hooked too, so at busy times all you get is the “ChatGPT is at capacity right now” page.

In January, Greg Brockman tweeted a waitlist for a “professional” version of ChatGPT (always available, no throttling, at least 2x the messages). Not long after, an upgrade option showed up right in ChatGPT for some of us. Of course I bought it, and on January 23rd I got this:

Email from the ChatGPT Team: Congratulations! You are now a ChatGPT Professional subscriber!

January 23, 2023. Discord invite redacted.

Price? $42/month. Like probably all the other nerds newly addicted to ChatGPT, I got the Hitchhiker’s reference. And for that, I could login without being told the site is at capacity, and so far I get a much higher usage limit.

Then on February 1st OpenAI announced ChatGPT Plus for $20 a month, and the next day the pilot people (I’m assuming all of us?) got this message:

Email from OpenAI: the plan is now ChatGPT Plus, the monthly cost is reduced from $42 to $20, and Plus members can get a private login link when ChatGPT is at capacity

February 2, 2023.

So ‘Professional’ is now ‘Plus’, and cheaper. Great! But the best part came after:

Email from OpenAI offering free access to ChatGPT Plus for the upcoming year as a thank you

A free year of Plus, for being a guinea pig for about ten days. No charges so far, so it looks like they meant it :)

And now that the ChatGPT model is in the API too (gpt-3.5-turbo, as of this week), I have a new toy to play with.