People are Selling ChatGPT Plus Accounts Amid OpenAI’s New Sign-up Halt

In a surprising move, OpenAI has paused new sign-ups for its premium subscription plan, ChatGPT Plus, which costs $20 per month. It does not affect users who use the free version of ChatGPT or existing ChatGPT Plus customers. ChatGPT Plus users get access to OpenAI’s best LLM models out there, GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo with support for plugins, internet browsing support, data analysis, image analysis, and a lot more. Why OpenAI has halted sign-ups? Let’s find out.

OpenAI Pauses New Sign-ups for ChatGPT Plus

Right after DevDay, OpenAI’s first developer conference, the company faced an intense DDoS attack, which led to the outage of ChatGPT and its APIs for more than a day. During DevDay, OpenAI announced GPTs — a custom version of ChatGPT that users can create for their specific purpose or task. The Microsoft-backed company was finally able to recover its services after mitigating the attack.

But now, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, announced on X (formerly Twitter) that the company is pausing new sign-ups for ChatGPT Plus. As you can infer from the tweet, the decision has been taken to ensure a smooth experience for new users. Altman says, “the surge in usage post devday has exceeded our capacity…” referring to a huge influx of users signing up for ChatGPT Plus to get access to all the new features.

During DevDay, OpenAI made several key announcements, including a new and improved GPT-4 Turbo model, a unified ChatGPT experience, GPTs, APIs for Dall -E 3, GPT-4V, a new Whisper V3 model, and much more. This has piqued the interest of users who were still on the fence about whether to get the premium plan or not.

Interestingly, amid the halt, some people are looking to bank on the hype and are offering shared use of their ChatGPT Plus accounts on eBay. It goes on to show that people are scrambling to get access to ChatGPT’s best capabilities, and OpenAI is unable to keep up with the demand. Just recently, reports suggested that OpenAI is unable to get its hands on powerful Nvidia GPUs and it’s working with Microsoft to build in-house AI chips to avoid over-reliance on Nvidia.

So what do you think about OpenAI’s decision to pause new sign-ups for ChatGPT Plus subscription? Let us know your opinions in the comments section below.