[catasaurus]

The paid version probably includes better servers and hardware for your ChatGPT instance, but OpenAI intentionally creating demand errors? I would think its more along the lines of they are using cheap servers to allow everyone to use ChatGPT and thus when too many people are trying to use this massive machine learning model (175B parameters), the wait time goes up and up as the models have more and more inputs to respond to.

Also most freemium platforms do try to motivate their users to upgrade to paid plans.

Spotify: No downloading music without paid plan, etc

AWS: Free tier but then you have to pay

Youtube: Ads but if you pay no ads

And on and on