I do not think this is true. You will continue to get smaller, cheaper-to-host models in the free tier that are distilled from current and former frontier models. They will continue to improve, but I’d be very surprised if, e.g., 5.4-mini (I think this is the free tier model) beat o3 on many benchmarks, or real world use cases.

I won’t even leave chatGPT on “Auto” under any circumstances - it’s vastly worse on hallucinations, sycophancy, everything, basically.

Anyway, your needs may be met perfectly fine on the free tier product, but you’re using a very different product than the Pro tier gets.