I did a LinkedIn poll last week of what people would pay for ChatGPT Plus. Small N and limited to my social network, but I think it shows that $20 isn't the right final price and code generation isn't the best use case:
ChatGPT is exploring a paid model. What's the most that would you/your employer would be willing to pay per user for a ChatGPT subscription?
It's fun, but not worth money 14 (35%)
<$20 / month 14 (35%)
$20 - $99 / month 2 ( 5%)
$100+ / month 10 (25%)
What's interesting is that in general the $0 people are less technical, the <$20 people are largely mid-level engineers, and the $100+ people are either Director+ level or in investing/finance.
Talking to people in that top bucket, they've found that it is excellent at doing first drafts of documentation and business correspondence and can save them significant mental energy every day - and it doesn't require the exactness of generated code. They're basically using it as an Outlook/Word extension. That's not how the ChatGPT product is positioned on chat.openai.com. I think this is going to be absolutely massive for generic white collar work.
As a mid-level dev, I remember putting $40/month in the survey OpenAI sent out. Granted, I kind of also expected API access for that price.
It's a very interesting multi-tool; being able to write first drafts for docs, summarize notes, and quickly consult the model about technical decisions is very nice. All of the answers need to be checked of course, but you'd normally need to do a second pass anyway.
I do worry about privacy in a work context. Presumably with the paid plan we get to limit the use of our data for training? If you can't discuss work topics with the bot then it immediately drops in value to <$20/month.
I wondered if that was the case, but having extra discretionary income doesn't explain the dead space between $20 and $100. It's a pretty bimodal distribution, and the directors/VPs aren't all making 5-10x what a mid-level eng does.
They definitely do more communicating and less creating. They also seem more willing to invest cash rather than just time into their careers. I'm sure having extra income doesn't hurt, though.
Talking to people in that top bucket, they've found that it is excellent at doing first drafts of documentation and business correspondence and can save them significant mental energy every day - and it doesn't require the exactness of generated code. They're basically using it as an Outlook/Word extension. That's not how the ChatGPT product is positioned on chat.openai.com. I think this is going to be absolutely massive for generic white collar work.