ChatGPT

ChatGPT is the AI you already use, whether you admit it or not. For most founders the real question isn't whether to pay for it. It's which other model to keep alongside it. After three years, the product is finally mature. The chat UI is the cleanest of the major AI tools. The desktop app is quietly the best way to interact with any LLM. Voice mode genuinely works on a walk or in the shower. Projects keep related conversations organised with shared context. Memory across chats is useful even if it occasionally hallucinates facts about you. The wins for founders are pretty obvious by now. Drafting first-pass copy that you then heavily edit. Debugging code by pasting in the error and stack trace. Summarising long docs you'd never have read. Brainstorming features by talking through them in voice mode (this one is criminally underrated, try it on a walk). GPT-4o is fast and competent at most things. o1 and o3-mini take longer but win on math and tricky reasoning. o3 is the frontier when you can get it. Where ChatGPT loses ground: Claude beats it on long-form writing and code quality often enough that I keep both subscriptions. Gemini has the longer context window if you need to drop in a million tokens. The Custom GPT marketplace is mostly a wasteland of mediocre wrappers. The mobile app is fine but the desktop one is where the magic is. For $20 a month, Plus gets you higher limits, the latest models, image generation through DALL-E, file uploads, and voice. Almost every founder I know pays for this and it's usually their highest-ROI subscription. The free tier is also genuinely useful now if you're just dipping in. My real take: pay for ChatGPT Plus. Pay for Claude Pro too. Use ChatGPT for image generation, voice mode, the polished consumer experience, and quick general questions. Use Claude for code and long-form writing. The $40 a month is the easiest budget call you'll make all year.