[staticman2]

Most people I know in real life have certainly heard of ChatGPT but don't pay for it.

I think someone enthusiastic enough to pay for the subscription is more likely to be willing to try a rival service, but that's not most people.

Usually when these services are ready to grow they offer a month or more free to try, at least that's what Google has been doing with their Gemini bundle.

[hiq]

I'm actually baffled by the number of people I've met who pay for such services, when I can't tell the difference between the models available within one service, or between one service or the other (at least not consistently).

I do use them everyday, but there's no way I'd pay $20/month for something like that as long as I can easily jump from one to the other. There's no guarantee that my premium account on $X is or will remain better than a free account on $Y, so committing to anything seems pointless.

I do wonder though: several services started adding "memories" (chunks of information retained from previous interactions), making future interactions more relevant. Some users are very careful about what they feed recommendation algorithms to ensure they keep enjoying the content they get (another behavior I'm was surprised by), so maybe they also value this personalization enough to focus on one specific LLM service.

[diego_sandoval]

The amount of free chats you get per day is way too limiting for anyone who uses LLMs as an important tool in their day job.

20 USD a month to make me between 1.5x and 4x more productive in one of the main tasks of my job really is a bargain, considering that 20 USD is very small fraction of my salary.

If I didn't pay, I'd be forced to wait, or create many accounts and constantly switch between them, or be constantly copy-pasting code from one service to the other.

And when it comes to coding, I've found Claude 3.5 Sonnet better than ChatGPT.

[bambax]

When used via OpenRouter (or the like?) the costs are ridiculously low and you have immediate access to 200+ models that you can compare seamlessly.

[datavirtue]

Chat assistants are table stakes. No individuals will be paying for these.

Search for bing, get to work.