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Comment by jonathanlydall

10 hours ago

My mother has a psychology practice and wanted to update her 20 year old website.

I did the first few prompts (single static page, basically a brochure, don’t worry about hosting) into ChatGPT to get her started and a few days later she sent me a .zip which I uploaded.

Only took a while because she wasn’t paying for ChatGPT so had to wait for the free limit to reset quite a few times.

But overall it was super empowering for her.

Not that I'm in favor of spending money unnecessarily, but I find it kind of surprising she didn't just spend the $20, given this was a website for her professional money-making business.

  • Wow, it’s fascinating after waking up to see all this conjecture here on why she didn’t pay for the subscription.

    The short version, wasn’t for wanting to save money, but simply a matter of it not being worth the hassle to any of us to subscribe and then later cancel for such a small scope of work. If it was too frustrating I would have let her use my Claude sub.

    Also, she’d been meaning to have it updated for years, a few extra days was nothing.

    She did short sessions in spare time between other things, the wait between was maybe a little frustrating, but also gave the benefit that she would have had better clarity develop between sessions.

    Website is not key to her business where it’s mostly word of mouth at this point (she’s been practicing for >20 years). Goals of website were:

    - Findable in Google by “psychologist/therapist <area name>” (she also has a Google. Business profile so is findable on Google Maps).

    - Minimal copy. A comforting sentence or two to state philosophy, qualifications, therapy types offered, where located, how to contact.

    - Doesn’t feel dated.

    Essentially it’s meant to complement the word of mouth aspect and maybe bring in the occasional completely new patient.

  • > I find it kind of surprising she didn't just spend the $20

    If it because the poster's mother dislikes the idea of subscriptions, then I totally get it. (Though I admit I have no idea if this has anything to do with the poster's mother's decision.)

    I'll go out of my way as much as I can to avoid signing up for anything that is a subscription because of how horrible the entire corporate world has abused subscription dark patterns over the past couple of decades.

    These days just the packaging of anything into a subscription makes me assume there is intent to screw people out of money.

    While signing up for LLM usage is fairly low risk as far as subscription lock-in goes, someone non-technical might not be aware of that fact.

    • See my more detailed sibling comment, but was more that the scope and urgency were so small that it wasn’t worth the hassle to set up the subscription and have to cancel it after.