OpenAI’s Evolving Approach to Free Features
OpenAI has been steadily increasing the premium features and model access that it offers for free users.
For example, this time two years ago, you needed to shell out for the $20 per month paid plan in order to access what was at the time OpenAI’s most advanced large language model, GPT-4. Today, you can get access to GPT-5 entirely for free (although the number of times you can use it will be limited).
Similarly, OpenAI has rolled out its Deep Research and ChatGPT Voice tools to all users, even though both of them started out as free.
Generative AI has so fully saturated culture at this point that OpenAI arguably needs to keep offering more new free abilities to keep earning headlines like the one at the top of this page.
