Barton's Blog

I subscribe to OpenAI‘s ChatGPT Plus and find use it regularly for research, writing and general queries.  Recently, however, I used ChatGPT to edit and tighten a blog draft and was taken aback by how poorly it performed. Curious, I turned to Anthropic’s Claude.  Claude didn’t just perform well—it blew me away with its polished rewrite. I seriously considered moving my workflow from ChatGPT to Claude.

But then things took another turn. This morning, while listening to a podcast I was reminded that ChatGPT’s has a bunch of versions, each optimized for specific tasks. I knew there were different options, but like many users, I never got around to finding out what the other flavors were and simply defaulted to ChatGPT 4.0. The podcast highlighted the anticipated release of ChatGPT 5.0, expected to streamline the currently complicated versioning situation rather than add more capabilities.

The host mentioned in passing that ChatGPT 4.5 was explicitly optimized for writing tasks. Prompted (no pun intended) by this, I revisited my initial draft, and ChatGPT 4.5 delivered an outstanding edit— what I had hoped for initially.  Unfortunately, my enthusiasm vanished when I tried editing a second piece via 4.5. And message popped up:

“You have 6 responses from GPT-4-5 remaining. If you hit the limit, responses will switch to another model until it resets July 17, 2025. – Get Pro”

Clicking on the link I discovered that upgrading from my current $20/month plan to the Pro tier, the only other package, would mean a tenfold increase in my monthly bill.  Who decided that having only two options, one at $20 and the other at $200, would meet customer expectations and drive increased revenue?  

Here’s hoping ChatGPT 5.0 addresses the tangled mess that is version selection, and introduces a revised pricing structure that aligns with user needs.

Pau for now…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2025 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.