ChatGPT Free vs Paid: will upgrading actually improve your experience?

While you can use ChatGPT (and Google Gemini) in a web browser, or on your mobile device, without even logging in, there are different subscription options available, and if you are going to use it regularly then you might soon hit up against the limits of a free account.

There are in fact three main ChatGPT tiers – Free, Plus and Pro, as well as a couple of subscriptions for business called Teams and Enterprise, and a version just for university students called ChatGPT EDU.

As you’d expect, the Free tier is the most basic, but it still gives you limited access to the latest version of ChatGPT-5 as well as access to real-time data from web searches using ChatGPT Search.

You can even access more advanced features like ChatGPT Voice, file uploads and image generation, however you get extremely limited access to these features. You’ll be limited to two or three images a day, for example.

Is Plus worth it?

ChatGPT Plus is the first paid-for tier and costs $20 / £20 / AU$30 a month. You do get a lot more usage for your money though, so you can effectively upload all the files you want, create all the images you want and use ChatGPT Voice almost as much as you like.

While the Free tier gives you access to ChatGPT-5.1, it will quickly revert to using a simpler model. On the Plus tier you get much more access to ChatGPT-5.1 and you can also use it in different modes like Thinking, in which it thinks for longer to give better answers, Thinking mini, in which it thinks quickly, Instant for quick answers and Auto mode, in which it decides which of its different modes to use based on the question you’ve asked.

You get a couple of nice bonus features as a Plus member, too. For a start there’s access to Sora, which is OpenAI’s excellent AI video generator. You are limited to 720p resolution, 10-second clips that feature a watermark though. Sora 2 access is coming but currently there's a waitlist.

You also get access to ChatGPT Agent. Agent has the ability to carry out your instructions in the background, so you can get on with something else. Once it has finished its job, which is usually to produce a report of some kind, it will simply inform you that it is done.

Another benefit of a Plus account is that you get access to what OpenAI calls legacy models, which are the older ChatGPT-4o and ChatGPT-o3 models, which some people prefer to the latest ChatGPT-5.1

Going Pro

If you’re serious about using ChatGPT then you might want to consider a Pro account, which costs a hefty £200/$200 a month and gives you access to ChatGPT-5 Pro, the most advanced LLM that OpenAI has to offer. It’s designed to use more computing power to give you the best possible answers to hard questions. You also get access to the older o3-pro model, as well as all the legacy models like ChatGPT-4o.

Your access to Sora video creation is much better in a Pro account, and this is often the main reason why people will upgrade to one. You get the ability to create 1080p resolution videos that last longer than 10 seconds and don’t have a watermark.

Ultimately, your decision about which plan to go for will depend what you're using ChatGPT for. If it's just occasionally then the free plan is probably fine for your needs. If you need more images particularly then the Plus plan makes sense. Finally, if money is no object then get the Pro plan, which has everything you need.

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