How much would you pay for ChatGPT's next upgrade? $100/month? $2,000?

Ewan MacLeod

05 Sep 2024 — 2 min read

I threw this one together with Canva. Can you tell it was human-made?

The fabulous technology news site, The Information, has posted a story today suggesting that OpenAI is considering pricing options for the next set of model(s) that they'll be releasing.

The opening line of the article asks:

How much would you be willing to pay for ChatGPT every month? $50? $75? How about $200 or $2,000?

You can read the rest of it here (paywalled).

The post highlights OpenAI's 'reasoning focused' model, Strawberry and their new LLM 'dubbed' Orion.

The stimulating question, of course, is how much would you pay?

Right now it's a flick of an executive wrist to decide on subscription fees. $20 or even $50 a month is probably not going to cause any leader or budget holder to pause and think about ROI, especially if the employee(s) using the subscriptions are citing some kind of usefulness.

I know that some have baulked at renewing their Microsoft Copilot subscriptions recently, but I could name dozens of colleagues who either subscribe directly to their own premium version of ChatGPT (and use it for work) or who actively expense the ChatGPT subscription – or they've been given it by their company, either as an expensed arrangement or an enterprise-grade facility.

All this is predicated on the thing being cheap, or at least, immaterial in the context of budget management.

Jack up the price, and things get interesting.

Jack it up to 2,000 USD a month and goodness me, now you're talking about the cost of a 40-hour-a-week 'resource' (or, actual human) in many markets.

I reckon anything near $250 a month, and serious people would need to crunch some serious numbers. It's still a small amount of money for most corporate budgets – again, compare this to a flight, or an expensed meal with a client. But when you've got 20% of the company suddenly committing to $250, PER MONTH, on their corporate card... if you've got 5,000 employees, suddenly that's a $7.5M annual run-rate you need to allow for.

Then it comes down to return on investment.

OpenAI would need to clearly enunciate the benefits at this kind of level.

If you're C-Level, do you qualify for $250/month ChatGPT "Orion" access? But if you're a junior employee, do you just get the basic premium option?

One of the other aspects from a pricing standpoint is the amount of processing power needed to make some of these even more sophisticated models work effectively. I could understand if some of these next-generation models stand on top of the existing $20-ish pricing tiers.