Why I Cancelled my ChatGPT Premium Subscription

I cancelled my ChatGPT premium subscription today.

...wait WHAT?? … Read on.

At the same time I'm still using its o1 and 4o models HEAVILY...

...elsewhere.

I noticed over the past two years that I gradually shifted my ChatGPT use from 100% chat-based to powerful integrations with tools like:

• Google Sheets

• Browser extensions

• Content generators

• Email plug-ins, etc.

RIGHT WHERE I work.

I think it's a natural progression. With time you realize where it gives you the biggest benefit 80% of the time.

For the remaining 20%, the free versions of GPT 4o-mini, Anthropic Claude, or Perplexity.ai are MORE than sufficient.

Just like Pieter Levels ships startups to tens of thousands of users with only PHP+SQLite, moving mountains, so too can you with GPT 4o-mini.

I mean, when was the last time you really hit the limits of the free ChatGPT for some simple 2-sentence query about your groceries' calorie count? 🤔

Jokes aside. With time you learn how to up your prompting game. You learn to foresee edge cases. You'll know when to use each model and approach. And you learn its limits. 

Even if you want to know more than the calories in your lunch, like for example planning a trip or using it for work, it’s capabilities are still incredible.

This is ESPECIALLY true when combining them with online research tools like Perplexity, that gives you updated information from the internet, and with Claude, which is known for its fresh writing style that’s well-suited for content creation.

And after all, if you really want to produce quality content (unlike the many “marketing cowboys” out there) you would NEVER send out your generated stuff right away. You would ALWAYS read it carefully, rearrange paragraphs, change words, sentences, style, and use it as a nothing more than a draft.

The real power of the Generative AI revolution lies in bulk processing: researching lists of 1,000s of prospects' websites, crafting powerful outreach copy for thousands of contacts, researching the market with at-scale video transcription & analysis, or understanding the intricacies of video calls.

You can do none of this in ChatGPTs conversation interface. None.

You could say that the last two years were an experimentation phase, a “getting acquainted” with Generative AI time, in its cute little chat box.

But the real power, the real heavy lifting, comes from integrating it into the fabric of heavily-used processes.

Just think of the single most repetitive step in your daily business, across all units. How often does it repeat? 100 times a day? 1,000? 10,000? If you can plug that step into the OpenAI API (or any other LLM), you’ve struck gold! That’s Generative AI. And you don’t need ChatGPT Premium for that. That’s for your kids’ playground in the sandbox in front of the house.

And that's also where you need the power of the latest reasoning models, paired with agent workflows that get better with new models’ reasoning capabilities.

Because new reasoning capabilities make sense for decision-making. Content generation is one thing, but the Holy Grail is unlocking goal-driven planning and execution.

2025 will be an exciting time for this.

And I personally prepare you for this shift towards agent workflows inside the Make Work Obsolete Community. You’ll also get access to a full AI course curriculum and weekly Q&A calls where you’ll get reliable answers to your questions from tech experts. Plus you’ll get to meet everyone else inside in the community chat.

Try it 7 days for free. I’ll see you inside!

Cheers,
Robert