OpenAI bumped the Pro plan to $100/month last week. I saw the announcement while I had three Chrome tabs open comparing insurance quotes, which felt like the universe making a point.

The insurance thing

Blue Cross, Aetna, and a marketplace plan side by side. Coverage details buried behind expandable sections that seemed engineered to make comparison physically painful. And one plan hid its out-of-pocket max inside a hover-only modal, which is a baffling design choice for a number that people literally plan their finances around.

So I did what everyone does. Copied chunks from each tab, pasted them into ChatGPT, wrote a long prompt explaining which numbers mattered, and waited. And then spent five minutes correcting the model because I’d missed a deductible and accidentally pasted a stale premium from a tab I thought I’d closed. The response came back wrong. Not because GPT-5.2 cannot reason about insurance, but because I fed it garbage while believing I’d been thorough, and more compute was never going to fix that. The model needed to see the damn pages.

So I tracked my usage for a week after that. Every friction point came back to the same place: browser tabs full of information on one side, a text box with zero page awareness on the other, and me in between making editorial decisions about what context the model gets to see. And those decisions were usually wrong in ways I did not notice until the output came back garbled, or worse, subtly incomplete enough that I just trusted it.

What $80 extra buys

A faster engine on a car with no windshield.

OpenAI prices along a vertical axis. Smarter models, longer reasoning chains, more compute. For researchers running multi-hour reasoning jobs that axis probably matters. But most people do not use ChatGPT that way. The median session is someone drafting emails or summarizing a report or filling out a form, and that person lives in Chrome eight hours a day while the AI sits in a separate text box with no awareness of any of it. No amount of reasoning power bridges that separation.

I wrote about this when ChatGPT hit 900 million users. And nearly all of them copy-paste between their actual work and a chat window, which Pro does nothing to change.

Tuesday with three Gmail threads

Three order confirmations with shipping details I needed cross-referenced against delivery dates in a Google Sheets spreadsheet. On Pro the workflow was: copy email contents, paste into chat, describe the spreadsheet layout by hand, copy the output, then paste each value into Sheets one cell at a time. So I was basically a human API, shuttling data between two tabs and a text box that didn’t know either one existed.

With dassi I opened the Gmail thread, asked for the shipping details, and watched it navigate to Sheets and fill in the rows. Same GPT-5.2 underneath. One could see my browser, one could not.

$100 vs. $30

ChatGPT Pro: $100/month, same text box. ChatGPT Plus with dassi: $30/month, full browser context.

That Reddit comment

Someone on r/ChatGPT described Pro as “paying for a faster brain locked in a closet.” And that line has been stuck in my head, because OpenAI has trained all of us to evaluate AI along a vertical axis (smarter, faster, deeper) and to pay along it too. But the actual bottleneck for most people is not intelligence. It is perception. The model cannot spend its way into seeing what you have to manually copy-paste for it, so you stay the bottleneck regardless of how many reasoning tokens get thrown at the problem.

So the real unlock is not a bigger brain. It is letting the model see the browser where your work actually lives. And paying $80 more for a faster brain in that same closet, when opening the door costs ten bucks, is like buying a nicer telescope and pointing it at the ceiling.