It looks like the price of ChatGPT Pro might be $42, which besides being a reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, seems like a decent price point.
For the purpose of this topic, I’m more interested in what you (would have) answered to the ChatGPT Professional Access waitlist form. Specifically, the following questions:
At what price ($ per month) would you consider ChatGPT to be so expensive that you would not consider buying it?
At what price ($ per month) would you consider ChatGPT to be priced so low that you would feel the quality couldn’t be very good?
At what price ($ per month) would you consider ChatGPT starting to get expensive, so that it is not out of the question, but you would have to give some thought to buying it?
At what price ($ per month) would you consider ChatGPT to be a bargain—a great buy for the money?
Agree with that. I also suspect that the upcoming competitors will be cheaper than $42, and I don’t see people paying for multiple LLM subscriptions at the same time, or at least not in the near future.
ChatGPT doesn’t have a lot of utility for me, besides maybe generating Lorem Ipsum text and the like. For coding I use Copilot and it’s better for me because there’s no context switching and it does editing. I can maybe see myself paying $10/mo for ChatGPT based on GPT-5 or 6, but I don’t have any clear use case in mind at the moment.
I am spending between $2-5 a day on GPT3 and loving it. Chat is basically GPT3.5 that is set to talk to itself. By that reasons I’d gladly pay the same price.
$2/day => $60/m
$5/day => $150/m
Funny thin is that I wouldn’t want to pay 150 if you asked me to, I’d think it was too expensive. But because it’s demand-driven, I am okay with paying whatever it costs because it adds value, and it does that only when I ask it to.
Interestingly, even $2/day is more than what they want as a monthly plan, so I am already overpaying even on my low demand days! Haha. Good for them!
Hi @Kirill and welcome! Interesting perspective. They probably considered the usage-based pricing and figured it wouldn’t work well for laypeople. Usage-based pricing tends to cause anxiety and makes people constantly think about their wallet. But I do see your point.
Last I heard, Sam Altman said that each conversation costs them on the order of a few cents (before optimizing it). Assuming $0.05 / convo, that’s 840 conversations per month per user for it to cost them $42. I think the actual usage is below 100 conversations per month. 90% gross margin seems about right for them.
I do expect them to reduce the cost as they start optimizing it (and as they start facing real competition). Overall pretty fair, and they definitely got lucky that the numbers worked out so that they could charge the magical number 42
@andrei I’d love to know how the pricing works out for them in the long run. I am imaging right now the $42 are targeting people who have enough money where 42 bucks to bypass a road block is nothing to them. That sounds like a lot of money ($500/year), but for business customers that’s not even a penny. I’d guess they have at least 5,000 paying customers by now, and that’s a few million bucks a year. Not enough to pay for the team, or the hardware, but a good start. If you know someone with insider information, please let us know!
I’m never in a rush or have anything urgent to do so I use ChatGPT for free. As long as they keep the free version I won’t pay for the premium one. But I think I would pay the 20 dollars if they shut down the free version.
