It's not a secret that nearly everyone uses chat GPT. Gone are the days of tedious internet research by searching through Google for answers on stack overflow. Nowadays people simply ask the all knowing oracle ChatGPT for their answer to various problems.
Now, as time progresses the all knowing oracle (ChatGPT) gets better and better. It gets new features and updates as time progresses. But these new features are always locked behind a paywall, in which you must pay a monthly fee to access. I am cheap, too cheap to pay for a tutor and too cheap to pay for a full GPT4 subscription. Privacy concerns aside, there is a way you can (marginally) increase your privacy while decreasing your costs for ChatGPT4 significantly. Lets dive in
Before we start, this guide is targeted at your average computer user, not your IT guru or software developer - I am simplifying a lot and not everything may be factually correct for the sake of simplicity. Anyways, ChatGPT is not just used by the average Joe to ask what happened on November 20th 1942. It is used by developers in Microsoft who ask "What if we added AI to everything in Windows?". Now, if every single Windows 11 deployment required Microsoft to pay ChatGPT 10 dollars a month, then Microsoft would be paying a stupid amount of money. I doubt that Microsoft pays a monthly 10$ per computer fee to ChatGPT, and yet they still have ChatGPT shipped with Windows 11. It would be much more likely that Microsoft would use ChatGPT's pay-as-you-go computer interface which costs much much less to use. Here is a cool fact that the elites don't want you to know: YOU dear reader, can get the developer pay-as-you-go pricing for ChatGPT instead of utilizing a costly monthly subscription.
How it works is you basically sign up for ChatGPT developer account, and use a computer interface for ChatGPT instead of the web-based one that most people use. You will need to add a card and purchase some things called tokens. Tokens are basically a method of measuring how much text you can feed to ChatGPT, the more text you send to the computer interface, the more tokens it will cost. This also goes for vice versa, the more text the all knowing oracle sends back to you, the more tokens you will burn. You can visualize this here.
So how do you login and use this developer-mode version of ChatGPT? Well, developers login to ChatGPT with their programs, but if the developers just put their username and password into their programs then someone could reverse engineer the program to steal the username and password! This isn't cool. Instead, there are these things called API keys, they act as a replacement for usernames and passwords and can be easily managed by the developer (as in generated and revoked as needed). What we must do then is generate an API key for us to access the ChatGPT computer interface.
Now, unfortunately the computer interface isn't exactly a nice thing to interact with, it is for sure less pleasant than the official "human interface". Tokens are supposed to be used by your computer in the background, not by actual humans. This means we need an alternative way for us Humans to interface with the ChatGPT via the computer interface, because I for sure do not want to use a command line. Thankfully there are Open Source apps which fix this problem for us! ChatGPT web is an open source website which you can use to utilize your pay-as-you-go payment plan as if it where your normal GPT interface. An active version of the code is deployed on github right here. All you need to do is paste your API key into the website and BAM you can use ChatGPT as if it where the real thing.
Aaand that's it! You follow the four easy steps! Sign up for GPT developer, add money to your account (tokens), make an API key, use the alternate interface! Just be aware that due to the nature of this alternate interface, your prompts will not be remembered, so save your replies after you are done using ChatGPT.
That's all for now, thanks for reading my blog.