My problem isn’t that I’m worried I’m spending too much, I know for a fact that I’m spending less than I did on ChatGPT Plus, I can check my usage regularly, and I do.

My problem is that before I send each query, I think to myself “is this worth a fraction of a penny?” and, when I have a bunch of follow up queries, I think “the previous query/response history is getting pretty big, should I trim some of it before I send my next query?” or “Should I skimp on this one and just use GPT3.5?”

This is the same reason I can't ever see microtransactions for news sites gaining traction. While I can't afford to subscribe to every news site I would like to, I also don't want to have to decide whether every news article I might read is going to be worth my penny before I read it. So I stick with the status quo of subscribing to a couple of key sites and skipping out when I hit a paywall. It's suboptimal for both sides but I can't see pay per article working any better realistically.