Using older ChatGPT models is free* and the people who pay for it do so for convenience. Sure, you can jump through 10 hoops to make it cheaper but for most peo

Using older ChatGPT models is free* and the people who pay for it do so for convenience. Sure, you can jump through 10 hoops to make it cheaper but for most people $20/month is less than the value they get from it. * prepaid with your data > A subscription incentivises the company to lower cost per token and move customers to cheaper models to increase margins, even if it's at the detriment of output quality. Due to the high-stakes vibes of LLM development and the similarity between UI, customers can switch to another provider pretty quickly in case the quality drops significantly.