I spent $200/mo on ChatGPT Pro so you don’t have to. It wasn’t worth it

Our Verdict

While ChatGPT Pro’s exclusive Operator agent is novel and fun to play with, it doesn’t provide enough practical value yet. The best part of ChatGPT Pro is the boost to rate limits, especially for Deep Research. If you aren’t making heavy use of Deep Research, then ChatGPT Plus offers better bang for your buck. Or you might be better off cobbling together a bunch of other premium AI services to suit your specific needs.

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What you get with ChatGPT Pro

What exactly do you get with ChatGPT Pro that you can’t get in the free version? Or even the much cheaper ChatGPT Plus plan that only costs $20 per month? The short answer is, every single feature OpenAI has to offer — and that list continues to grow quite quickly.

The longer answer is that ChatGPT Pro provides access to all OpenAI LLMs (including GPT-4o, GPT-4.5o, o3-mini, o3-mini-high, and o1) along with all the latest features like Operator and Deep Research.

On top of that, ChatGPT Pro includes full access to the company’s AI models for media generation, which includes Dall-E for image generation and Sora for video generation. Pro users get priority video generation and, in the case of Sora, access to better resolutions (up to 1080p) and extended durations (up to 20 seconds).

ChatGPT Free vs. Plus vs. Pro

If you’re still feeling a bit confused about what you get with the different ChatGPT plans, don’t worry, you aren’t alone. Here’s a quick chart I whipped up to help you visualize the differences:

Matt Smith / Foundry, made with Claude

As the chart shows, upgrading from ChatGPT Free to ChatGPT Plus unlocks access to multiple features, while upgrading from ChatGPT Plus to ChatGPT Pro only unlocks one wholly exclusive feature: Operator.

However, I want to draw your attention to the last feature listed in the comparison, which is rate limits. OpenAI regularly changes the rate limits for ChatGPT Free, Plus, and Pro, and they aren’t always documented.

ChatGPT Free

Generally, though, the rate limit for ChatGPT Free is extremely low. You can exhaust resources with just a few conversations, forcing you to wait hours before you can ask another question. ChatGPT Free’s rate limits for more advanced features (like the o3 reasoning model and Dall-E image generation) are so low that they border on useless.

ChatGPT Plus

ChatGPT Plus is much more generous. While OpenAI’s LLMs still have firm rate limits in this tier, they’re high enough that most people won’t hit them with typical usage. The rate limits for other advanced features (like Dall-E, Sora, and Deep Research) are still tight, though.

ChatGPT Pro

ChatGPT Pro’s rate limits are much higher. Certain advanced features are still kind of limited (e.g., Deep Research is capped at 120 generations per month) but high enough that most people won’t come close to hitting them. I used ChatGPT Pro heavily, racking up more than a dozen full conversations a day, and never hit any rate limits.

In other words, the rate limits on ChatGPT Pro will only become an issue if you’re incorporating it into automated workflows — in which case you’re really meant to access OpenAI’s models through its APIs.

ChatGPT Pro vs. Claude with Perplexity, Midjourney, ElevenLabs, and Kling

OpenAI is the most famous of AI companies, but it’s far from the only one. Its many competitors include DeepSeek, Anthropic, Midjourney, ElevenLabs, Meta, and Google to name a few.

Which raises the question: If ChatGPT Pro is so dang expensive, how does it compare to the competition? Well, the $200/month spent on ChatGPT Pro would actually be enough to cover the monthly plans for several different AI alternatives, spreading the cost across multiple.

For this review, I tried ChatGPT Pro against five alternative services:

• Anthropic Claude Pro (AI chatbot) — $20/month
• Perplexity Pro (web search) — $20/month
• Midjourney Standard (image generation) — $30/month
• Kling AI Pro (video generation) — $25/month
• ElevenLabs Creator (speech-to-text/text-to-speech) — $22/month
• Total cost — $117/month

Choosing a suite of competitive AI services with capabilities similar to ChatGPT Pro certainly looks appealing on paper. The total cost is nearly half the price, a steep discount compared to ChatGPT Pro.

Matt Smith / Foundry

This à la carte approach arguably provides access to a better selection of AI services, too. Coders generally prefer Claude over ChatGPT while Perplexity is better for web search than ChatGPT’s built-in search, for example. Creatives hugely prefer Midjourney’s image generation model to Dall-E, and Kling AI’s titular video models are often recommended over Sora. ElevenLabs, meanwhile, offers speech-to-text and text-to-speech capabilities that ChatGPT doesn’t even provide.

On the other hand, ChatGPT Pro offers some features that competitive services don’t emulate. Claude doesn’t offer alternatives to Deep Research or Operator. ElevenLabs’ text-to-speech and speech-to-text are useful but not the same as ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice. And while a variety of AI agents exist, no competitor offers a simple, ready-to-use AI agent like OpenAI’s Operator.

This comparison between ChatGPT Pro and a suite of alternative services shows an important point: if you’re subscribing to ChatGPT Pro, it’s likely for access to features that are exclusive to ChatGPT Pro (or rate limited in such a way that they’re only useful with ChatGPT Pro).

In that case, we need to dive into those exclusive ChatGPT Pro features and evaluate them for value. Are they worth it? Let’s find out.

ChatGPT Pro’s reasoning models

Let’s start with ChatGPT Pro’s access to OpenAI reasoning models. These models use chain-of-thought reasoning to prompt themselves as they try to work through a problem.

This helps the model whenever it’s asked to deal with something that involves logic or requires understanding the real world to reach the correct answer. Reasoning models score well across a wide range of publicly available benchmarks, but they stand out in math, coding, science, and related fields.

Matt Smith / Foundry

For example, when asked to write code for a particular feature in an app, a reasoning model will often do a better job. It can reason through potential use cases for the feature, as well as the varying approaches to implementation, as it looks for an adequate response. This is more likely to result in code that’s immediately useful without modification.

Because of this, reasoning models like OpenAI o1 tend to dominate AI benchmarks focused on math and coding.

It’s not all good news for reasoning models, though. They’re slower than conventional AI chatbots, and the more reasoning an AI does, the slower it gets. (ChatGPT o1 can leave you waiting for a minute or longer before it starts to generate a reply.) Reasoning models also tend to have more limited access to files and tools. If you want to use OpenAI o1 to analyze a PDF, for example, you can’t upload it. The best you can do is copy and paste the text into the prompt, which limits the usefulness of reasoning models depending on what you want ChatGPT to do.

Reasoning models are great if you want an AI model to help you brainstorm difficult problems or write code that’s more relevant to your