Comment by johanyc
11 days ago
> the problem is the human cost of a transaction. The mental overhead of deciding whether I want to make a purchase to consume every piece of content […] > When someone on the internet tries to sell you something for a dollar, how often do you really take them up on it?
It depends on how micro they are. Your example of $1 is quite big. It should be cents or even less.
Several examples. When using chatgpt api, do you really worry how much a short q&a session will cost you? Do you stress whether to turn on the light in your room or not (electricity cost is also micro-transaction if you think about it)?
$1 is not a micro-transaction, it's just a regular transaction. It's not micro until it's only several cents at most.
I'm not the parent, but when I use the OpenAI API (not ChatGPT API, that stuff is very cheap in comparison), I do keep an eye on my spend. For the more variable models like o3, o3-pro, GPT-4.5, expenditure can quickly exceed what you decided to spend. I'm glad you can set spending limits if you choose to do so.
For the examples you gave, there is a lot of marginal cost to provide more of the product. ChatGPT and your utility would be bankrupt if they gave infinite usage. Although ChatGPT’s consumer product is flat rate (users greatly prefer that model), rumor is that they lose money if you use the big models a lot, and they do cap usage.