Deleting my GPTs
Today I deleted all of my public and private GPTs. I thought I would feel sad: they were the feature that convinced me to start paying for OpenAI last year. But instead it feels like an anticlimactic end to an experiment.
When custom GPTs were initially launched, I was interested in an official playground for prompt engineering with the potential of a marketplace. I spun up a few and even wrote some articles about it. But the feature fizzled and the market hasn’t panned out.
Beyond a questionably-accurate conversation count, OpenAI doesn’t provide even basic usage data. Critical measures like recent sessions, average conversation length, and bounce rate are all missing. Maybe you could overlook that if your GPTs made a few bucks a month, but there is no market and no clear road to one.
That was enough to convince me, but paying for the privilege of keeping these GPTs online wore me down too. I don’t like being tied down with subscription services, and GPTs were the only thing keeping me in the OpenAI ecosystem. So I deleted them.
Without the GPTs, I’m free to switch to Claude (which all my cool prompt-engineer friends say is better) or nothing at all. $20 a month goes pretty far at a food bank or international charity.
If you were a faithful user of my GPTs, then I apologize for the change. But dozens of users are not enough to justify the expense or the lock-in. Send me an email, and I will share everything you need to make your own.