ReadyRunner

April 30, 2023
 What to do if ChatGPT is at capacity right now

The free ChatGPT website from OpenAI is sometimes overwhelmed with too many users, and will not let you use it for a while.

There's several easy ways to deal with this, the most reliable options require spending some money.

Pay $20/month for ChatGPT Plus

OpenAI has a ChatGPT plus offering which has priority when the main ChatGPT site is unavailable due to capacity. It costs $20/month and also gives you access to the newest features first such as the newer GPT-4 model.

Use an alternative ChatGPT app

There are other apps which provide the same experience as ChatGPT, using the same AI chat models (GPT-3 and GPT-4). ReadyRunner is our ChatGPT alternative which runs on on Desktop (Mac or Windows) or on the web. You get 10 free messages per month and can pay for more. You can even access GPT-4 for less than the cost of ChatGPT Pro.

You can download ReadyRunner and try it for free.

ReadyRunner is not subject to ChatGPT's capacity issues, because it uses the OpenAI API directly.

Use the OpenAI API playground

This option is a bit more technical, and requires signing up for an OpenAI API key, but the cost is fairly low. If you sign up as a developer, and provide a credit card, you can use the OpenAI playground tool which is meant for developers to test out the OpenAI APIs to talk with ChatGPT.

  • Choose "Chat" under the "Mode" dropdown in the sidebar
  • Choose GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 under the "Model" dropdown
  • Type in a "User" message
  • Press "Submit"

Wait for ChatGPT to come back

If you wait, ChatGPT will eventually be back online. You can try to find times of day where ChatGPT is used less, making it less likely to go down.