ChatGPT Plus Subscription: Think It’s Costly? You’ll Save Thousands. It’s a Bargain!
📘 Starting Off
I recently invited my friend to ChatGPT Plus using a special code(referral link). This allowed him to use it for 2 weeks for free. Same evening he had a lot of fun generating images with it using inbuilt Dall-E 3 image generator. So much so that he soon, he reached a limit! ChatGPT Plus allows only 50 messages every 3 hours. My friend wanting more jested, “Why is there a limit? Are we in stone age?”
I understand his question, and below I’ll give you an answer.
🔍 Understanding ChatGPT
ChatGPT can read a super long message (around 4000 words from you plus 4000 words of context you don’t see) and reply with a slightly shorter message (around 4000 words). That’s a lot! Imagine reading a dozen pages of a book and then making few page summary out of them. Additionally, each time you can request ChatGPT generate 4 cool pictures for you! Ouh the magic braisntorming and visualizing a fary tale story alogn with your kid.
💰 How Much Does This Magic Cost?
If we didn’t want to pay flat ChatGPT Plus fee and wanted to use all this magic, we’d have to pay for each message and picture using OpenAI API. And making calls to OpenAI API costs a tiny bit for each word(they use smaller then words units though called tokens). Here’s what the prices look like:
- 3 cents per 1000 words of input
- 6 cents per 1000 words of output(GPT4 8K context used in ChatGPT Plus)
- 2 cents per picture(for Dall-E 2, we do not know price of Dall-E 3 yet)
You can check all these prices on their website: OpenAI Pricing.
🧮 Doing Some Fun Math
One could say, OpenAI is investing — thousands of dollars in you
Let’s pretend you really, really love using ChatGPT. You use it all day(for 15 hours a day), chatting and making pictures. In a whole month, you’d send sooo many messages!
Fifteen hours is 5 batches of 3 hours. And you get 50 messages each 3 hours. Its 250 messages per day. Or 7750 per month.
If each message and response contains 8000 tokens of input and 4000 tokens of output, plus gives you 4 pictures, you would get
- 62M input tokens
- 32m output tokens
- 31k of images
If we add up all the words and pictures, it’s like reading 320 books with 97 pictures in each! And guess what? You only pay $20 for all of this!
How much it would cost trough API? Well:
- 62m * 0,00003$ = 1860$ for input text
- 31m * 0,00006$ = 1860$ for output text
- 31k * 0,02$ = 620$ for images
If you used used all that trough API instead of ChatGPT Plus, it would cost you a HUGE treasure chest of $4340! 😱
So, by paying just $20, you save a big amount of $4360!
Wow! That is if you generate 320 books with 100 images each month 😃
🎉 The True Value of ChatGPT Plus for Power Users
ChatGPT Plus costs $20. If you use it a lot and in smart ways, you can get much more value than what you paid. In fact, using all its features outside of ChatGPT Plus would cost much more. So, when you make the most of ChatGPT Plus, you’re saving a lot of money. One could even say that OpenAI is investing thousands of dollars in you 💼💡
