Presumably the paid api also will give you access when the chatgpt website is at capacity, and for most people it is probably orders of magnitude cheaper.

I wouldn’t mind paying a premium for the convenience (maybe $5 per month, billed monthly, max), but I’m definitely not spending $20.

Same here. That was the sole reason I upgraded. There were a few times where I really needed ChatGPT at a specific time and got the "we're at capacity" message. $20/mo is nothing to have that go away.

There were a few outages that also locked me out (obviously) as a paying subscriber. Not sure how often I was able to access it even though the service was ‘at capacity’. Knowing something like that might make me feel better about the value of Premium.

That’s a bummer to hear that outages can lock out paying subscribers. That hasn’t happened to me yet but if it does that would cause me to reconsider the premium subscription.

When you say you "really needed" ChatGPT, what was the use case?

Analysis of customer feedback on behalf of consulting clients (hence the deadline where downtime wasn’t acceptable).