What Is ChatGPT Plus?

By now, millions of people have tried ChatGPT, but there’s an even more advanced version of this disruptive AI service known as ChatGPT Plus. The Plus version can do some pretty wild things, but is it worth it for you?

What Is ChatGPT Plus?

The ChatGPT Plus subscription service is an optional paid tier that provides consistent access to ChatGPT, even during peak demand times. A ChatGPT Plus subscription also gives users priority access to new features and enhancements before they are released to the public.

ChatGPT Plus represents the latest step forward in AI chatbot technology from OpenAI. It’s a chatbot trained on a diverse range of internet text, and it can draft emails, write Python code, create written content, answer trivia, and even do a little bit of tutoring in various subjects.

But the “Plus” signifies something more—a subscription service that provides several additional features and benefits compared to the free version of ChatGPT.

ChatGPT Plus Price

The ChatGPT Plus subscription costs $20 per month and is readily available across the world. However, if you’re not in a supported region, there’s no easy way to bypass the restrictions, since you’ll have to provide evidence of your location, making location spoofing with a VPN ineffective.

What Free Users Get

If you’re not ready to hand over any money to OpenAI, you still get access to a big chunk of the technology. For most people, the free tier of ChatGPT offers enough functionality to cover their needs.

You get free access to GPT-4o mini, which is a smaller version of the premium full-fat GPT-4o model. Mini is smarter and faster than the old GPT-4, which was already impressive in its own right. You also get limited access to GPT-4o, but honestly, that’s only useful as a demo, to help you decide if Plus is worth paying for.

You get access to the standard voice mode on the app, which is good enough for straightforward conversations with the LLM, and you also get limited access to advanced data analysis, web browsing, and AI image generation. You’ll run into these limits often enough for it to be annoying, but if you’re willing to wait for a reset, then it’s not a huge deal.

Free users also get to access custom GPTs, which are pre-made bots using prompts and data crafted by Plus or higher subscribers.

ChatGPT Plus Features

ChatGPT Plus grants users access to GPT-4o, as opposed to GPT-4o Mini for free users. This is a much more advanced language model from OpenAI that brings together multiple types of media compared to old models like GPT-4.

You also get access to GPT-4o with canvas, which is a special tool to help you write or to code.

While having constant access to the premium 4o model is well worth the cost of Plus, another huge advantage of subscribing is access to o1. This is a model that has advanced reasoning. Older GPT models, 4o included, often make reasoning errors when confronted with complex instructions or problems. With o1 you can see the entire “thinking” process, and it can solve much more complex issues. On the Plus plan, your access to o1 and o1-mini is limited, but you usually only need these models to tackle issues where 4o fails.

Of course, you also get to make custom GPTs as a Plus subscriber, and this is one of the best features of ChatGPT, since you can tweak special versions of the bot to do specific jobs for you, and then share that bot with other people, such as your project collaborators.

Is ChatGPT Plus Worth It?

ChatGPT Plus’s value depends mainly on your chatbot usage. If you rely on ChatGPT for tasks like writing code or brainstorming ideas, you may benefit from the consistent uptime and priority access offered by the Plus subscription. In other words, if you’re using ChatGPT to help with paying work, or it’s creating more value for you than $20, it’s definitely worth it.

The variety of advanced tools are all worth it by themselves in my opinion, but again it depends on what you need them to do. Since there’s no downside to simply trying the free tier first, that’s what I suggest most people do.

There’s also an eye-bleeding $200 a month “Pro” tier, which gives you unlimited o1 access, and a pro mode which makes more computer power from the data center available to you. This is still a new tier as of this writing, so it remains to be seen for which type of user that $200 price tag makes sense, but I certainly don’t regret paying $20 a month for Plus!