It’s not clear whether ChatGPT will stop being available for free in the future – and if so, when. The tool was originally released in November 2022 as a “research preview”. It was released for free so that the model could be tested on a very large user base.
The framing of the tool as a “preview” suggests that it may not be available for free in the long run, but so far, no plans have been announced to end free access to the tool.
A premium version, ChatGPT Plus, is available for £16 a month and provides access to features like GPT-4, a more advanced version of the model. It may be that this is the only way OpenAI (the publisher of ChatGPT) plans to monetise it and that the basic version will remain free. Or it may be that the high costs of running the tool’s servers lead them to end the free version in the future. We don’t know yet.