Let's see which tool won't abandon you when you need it most - whether that's a weekend deployment, client demo tomorrow, or just trying to fix something that should be simple.
ChatGPT Plus: Great Until You Hit the Wall
ChatGPT Plus gives you GPT-4, GPT-4o, and access to the GPT Store for $20/month. Sounds good until you discover the 40 messages every 3 hours limit. Hit that wall while you're in a flow state? Too bad, you're back to GPT-3.5 until the timer resets.
GPT-4o randomly downgrades you to the mini version during busy times - doesn't tell you, just starts giving shittier answers. I was debugging some Node.js connection issues and couldn't figure out why my code suddenly got worse. Took me 20 minutes to realize it had switched to the dumb model.
I learned this the hard way during a 4-hour debugging session. Right when I was making progress tracing what I thought was a memory leak (turned out to be some stupid recursive function eating heap space), boom - rate limited. Had to wait 3 hours or switch to the free tier that couldn't understand the context I'd spent 2 hours building up.
What actually works: DALL-E integration is solid for quick mockups, web browsing through Bing is decent when it doesn't break, and the GPT Store has some useful custom models if you can find them in the mess of duplicate "SEO optimizers."
What sucks: That 40-message limit hits way faster than you think with complex coding problems. Plus the ChatGPT Team tier at $25-30/user is insanely overpriced unless you're doing ML research 12 hours a day.
Claude Pro: Better Limits, Worse Ecosystem
Claude Pro costs the same $20/month ($17 if you pay annually), but handles usage limits differently. Instead of hard cutoffs, it has "fair-use throttling" and 5-hour session resets.
In practice, this means Claude rarely cuts you off mid-conversation like ChatGPT does. I can usually get 30-50 messages in a session before hitting soft limits, and the context window up to 200K tokens means it can actually read entire codebases.
What actually works: Document analysis is outstanding - it can parse massive PDFs and actually understand them. The longer context means better code reviews and it rarely forgets what we were discussing.
What sucks: No image generation, limited web browsing, and the ecosystem is basically nonexistent compared to ChatGPT's plugins and integrations. Good luck finding third-party tools that work with Claude.
Claude's "fair use" throttling is usually gentle, but it picked the worst possible moment to kick in - right when our API was throwing 502s and costing us stupid money, like $200 an hour. Took forever to get help when I needed it.
