Weeks after rolling out its new flagship AI model, GPT-4o, OpenAI has announced that several features that were previously behind the ChatGPT Plus paywall are now available to free users as well. According to a post on X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT’s free users can now use browse, vision, data analysis, file uploads, and custom GPTs.
OpenAI made it clear that many of these features would be coming to the free tier back when it revealed GPT-4o. “We are starting to roll out more intelligence and advanced tools to ChatGPT Free users over the coming weeks,” the team said at the time.
This is a major step forward for the platform and will give more users than ever access to some of ChatGPT’s most compelling features. Free users can now upload documents and ask the bot to summarize them, have ChatGPT search the internet to help answer their questions, and use dozens of custom GPTs from third-party developers.
As exciting as this is for free users, some ChatGPT Plus subscribers are unhappy.
“Gonna be honest, this sucks,” said one Redditor. “As a paid user, you are getting dramatically less compute for your money. Your payment subsidizes the free users.”
Many ChatGPT Plus subscribers all around the web echoed the sentiment. After all, most of the exclusive benefits of the premium service were just made free in one fell swoop. ChatGPT Plus still gives you the ability to send up to five times more messages to GPT‑4o and DALL·E image generation, but nearly everything else is now free.
