ChatGPT

So what do you actually do with ChatGPT? Ask it things. Pretty much any things.

Type "explain standard deviation like i'm twelve" or "write a polite no to this meeting invite" and back comes an answer. Nothing to set up, nothing to learn first.

It's not only text. Describe a picture and it draws one. Take a photo of a handwritten note and it types it out. Tap the soundwave icon on your phone and you can just talk to it.

Need something current? It searches the web. And Deep Research goes off, reads a pile of pages and comes back with a full report.

Honestly, the range is the reason to pick it. Chat, pictures, voice, search and research in one app, on your phone and your laptop.

The free plan does run out. Text chat is unlimited, but uploads, images, voice, deep research and memory all have caps. One App Store reviewer says they were cut off for the day after about five messages and pointed at Plus.

It also keeps changing under you. One reviewer says answers got less direct after an update. Another was furious when the button that reads answers aloud vanished.

And like every chatbot, it gets things wrong. A Hacker News commenter asked it to merge two group photos into one, and it kept changing everyone's faces. So check anything that matters.

Then there are ads. OpenAI says the $8 Go plan may include them.

The price ladder gets steep fast, too. It's $8, then $20, then $100, $200 or $500 a month for Pro.

Start free. Text chat has no cap, and for everyday questions that may be all you ever need.

Go is $8 a month. It gives you more of what's limited on free: more uploads, more images, more voice and longer memory. OpenAI notes it may include ads, which is an odd thing to pay for.

Plus is $20 a month, and it's where things open up. You get the advanced reasoning models, more deep research, projects, scheduled tasks, custom GPTs and Codex, a coding agent.

Pro comes in three sizes: $100, $200 or $500 a month. We'd skip it unless ChatGPT is pretty much your job.

For a team, Business is $20 a person a month on yearly billing, or $25 monthly. You need at least 2 people.

ChatGPT has 4.8 on the App Store from about 11 million ratings. No, that's not a typo. Very few apps get anywhere near that.

What do people use it for? School comes up a lot. One student, back at college after years away, says it got them through a statistics class by putting every idea into plain words.

Others lean on it for personal stuff, like talking through a breakup or keeping a journal. Make of that what you will, but it shows how easy people find it to talk to.

On Hacker News you see the practical side. One small business feeds in its receipts and gets a spreadsheet file back, which saved them buying another tool. Another, who runs their own business, says they get by fine on the free plan.

The grumbles? Limits on the free plan, features that vanish in updates, and answers that got less direct.