OpenAI Makes Pretty Much All Of ChatGPT Free, Making Paying Less Important

OpenAI has one of the fastest-growing app ever, and that it had no equal.

But since the generative AI started, and after the immensely fast adoption of ChatGPT, rivals started popping up, offering features that are either similar, or very competitive.

Even its main backer, Microsoft, has its own generative AI product, powered by OpenAI's technology, but tweaked to its requirements.

In an attempt to make ChatGPT more popular, OpenAI continues to expand the options available to free ChatGPT users.

And this time, the company started by making its newest model, GPT-4o, generally free to all users.

Then, it also expanded the accessibility of major 4o features by removing the paywalls on file uploads, vision (which can use your camera for input), and GPTs (or custom chatbots).

Browse, data analysis, and memory, also formerly paywalled features, were already available to free users in a similarly limited capacity.

While OpenAI offers ChatGPT Plus users subscription to unleash ChatGPT to its fullest potential, its strategy in making pretty much all of ChatGPT features available for free, is making paying for ChatGPT Plus even less important for many.

In fact, some paid users are not exactly happy with the change, with many wondering what the point of having ChatGPT Plus.

But again, like previously said, there are limits on the free version of ChatGPT.

Once free users reached those limits, their ChatGPT AI will be reverted back to GPT 3.5, the original GPT, as OpenAI hasn’t made GPT 4 or GPT 4 Turbo accessible in the free tier.

While free users are getting more features, paying users still get up to five times more messages with GPT-4o than free users do.

What's more, ChatGPT Plus subscribers still get access to the ability to make their own GPTs, and at this time, they also have the privilege to get new features earlier than free users.

In other words, OpenAI is still giving Plus users some exclusivity free users are not getting.

OpenAI has been clear about its plans to expand the offerings that its free users can take advantage of since it first revealed GPT-4o.

And here, OpenAI is just fulfilling those promises.

For the company, this may translate to less income.

But as a company with pretty much unlimited resources, thanks to Microsoft, offering more features to free users should translate to more active users.

And this should mean more usage testing.

And this should help improve the AI models running ChatGPT.

Giving more people access to ChatGPT’s best features brings the chatbot in line with one of its biggest competitors, Anthropic's Claude, which allows free users access to the latest version of its AI model.

And not to mention, the competition is already saturated, with Google, Meta, and some others trying to benefit from the trend.

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