This is very true. ChatGPT has a very generous free tier. I used to pay for it, but realized I was never really hitting the limits of what is needed to pay for it.

However, at the same time, I was using Claude much less, really preferring the answers from it most of the time, and constantly being hit with limits. So guess what I did. I cancelled my OpenAI subscription and moved to Anthropic. Not only do i get Claude Code, which OpenAI really has no serious competitor for.

I still use both models but never run into problems with OpenAI, so i see no reason to pay for it.