k310 2026-02-28 06:15 UTC link

I'n sorry, Dave ...

tobr 2026-02-28 06:37 UTC link

I had been considering ditching everyday ChatGPT use in favor of Claude anyway, but hadn’t gotten around to it mostly out of habit. Now I have a good reason to do it.

ddxv 2026-02-28 06:40 UTC link

Just deleted my account. Can always sign up for a new account later if you need (with a different email).

padolsey 2026-02-28 06:45 UTC link

Before you fully delete your account, don't forget to first save your chats! Go to https://chatgpt.com/#settings/DataControls and click Export under "Export Data".

willio58 2026-02-28 06:51 UTC link

Just cancelled. I’ll give my money to a company with leaders that have a modicum of backbone.

InMice 2026-02-28 06:53 UTC link

A few days ago I went to cancel mine and it just said they'd give me a free month instead so I said OK. I thought it was funny all the patterns to keep you on

tintor 2026-02-28 06:54 UTC link

I just cancelled my ChatGPT subscription that I had since 2023. OpenAI offered me an extra month free, to keep my subscription.

overgard 2026-02-28 06:55 UTC link

I just can't help but imagine ChatGPT's sycophancy mixed with military operations. "Sharp insight bombing that wedding! Next would you like tips on mosques to bomb, or I can suggest some new napalm recipes that are extra spicey. Your call!"

wonsukchoi97 2026-02-28 07:00 UTC link

I thought it was only me. I just unsubscribed it this morning.

ddtaylor 2026-02-28 07:14 UTC link

Story time!

I actually cancelled my ChatGPT subscription in late 2024 and documented the process, kind of as a social media thing because it had gotten so bad and I realized nobody in my family was using it anymore. I asked my wife if she was getting any use out of it and she told me she had been using Gemini and Grok for months because "GPT is very lazy now".

After a while another charge came in for the subscription, but I had the receipts: we had cancelled before the next billing cycle. I decided to try and reach out to OpenAI to resolve this, but they only let you chat with GPT itself for this, which it failed at and told me they weren't in the wrong and none of the information matched what actually happened.

I took this and used it to submit a chargeback request with Privacy.com, which I use for all of my online purchases. Normally I don't have to worry about this because I set a limit or cancel the cards I issue manually, but I had an OpenAI API account using the same card and I had been a bit lazy in using the same card for technically two different services.

Well, Privacy.com won that dispute and I got that money back. It's worth mentioning this is actually different than most banks will do now days. For the most part when you try to get a bank to do a chargeback they just roll it into their insurance and refund you the customer as a cost of doing business, but the actual scammer or shady merchant got to keep their stolen money, whereas I can be certain OpenAI didn't keep my money.

segmondy 2026-02-28 07:31 UTC link

This is a good time to promote running your own models. I have been running my own models locally and I would wager a local model will meet 85-95% of your needs if you really learn to use it. These models have gotten great. For anyone wanting to get into this, the smartest models to run recently that is consumer friendly was just released, checkout Qwen3.5 the 27B and 35B variants. They are small and I recommend running full Q8 quants. The easiest way to run these without dealing with complex GPU is to get a mac. For the example I gave, a 64gb mac will handle it well. If you are really cash strapped then you can manage with a 32gb but will have to run with less resolution quants. If you are not cashed strap, then get at least a 128gb and if possible a 256gb. The models are so good you will regret not getting a better system. You can join the r/LocalLlama community in reddit to learn some more. But this is pretty easy. Grab llama.cpp, grab a gguf quant from huggingface.co - the unsloth quants are great - https://huggingface.co/unsloth/models

hedayet 2026-02-28 07:42 UTC link

I'd cancelled my subscription earlier this month organically as I wasn't getting any net positive value.

BTW, what's going to hurt their business more, deleting my account or using the free tier?

mnsc 2026-02-28 07:49 UTC link

I love that the tool in question is very calm and collected, in contrast with the emotional wreck that is the US regime. I got a very helpful response to this prompt and I will make it continue working on a python script to get my historical chats looking good in Obsidian.

> Ok. So I'm cancelling the subscription to ChatGPT and moving over to Claude because of the news of OpenAI striking a deal with us department of war. (https://www.techradar.com/pro/openai-just-signed-a-huge-deal...) Please line out a good exit strategy where I can keep the information in my chats and projects on my own hard drive.

2001zhaozhao 2026-02-28 07:59 UTC link

PSA: If you can't switch your coding agent right away, you can just reroute Codex to a different model for the time being.

https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/26#issuecomment-28116...

raphman 2026-02-28 08:02 UTC link

How long does data export usually take for three years of medium usage? I started it eight hours ago, got a confirmation email that export had started but so far no email with a download link.

PacificSpecific 2026-02-28 08:08 UTC link

I'm gonna have to see if I can get my company to switch off openAI. Hopefully we can make a small dent and if enough of us do it, a larger dent.

Sounds like it won't really be a pain for me though based off comments on HN indicating Claude is the better product and I doubt I personally would hit any sort of token limits with the amount I use agentic coding.

eranation 2026-02-28 08:39 UTC link

After the "upside down cup" debacle, and the "walk vs drive to the carwash" conundrum, and so many other examples where GPT 5.2 thinking failed miserably and Opus 4.6 and (even Sonnet 4.6 extended thinking) nailed it, I think they earned people wanting to cancel their subscription regardless of yesterday's events.

maxbond 2026-02-28 09:27 UTC link

I've just cancelled my subscription in solidarity with the OpenAI employees who signed the We Will Not Be Divided letter. I was a daily user of paid features like Deep Research. But not only was Anthropic's decision more ethical, their products are better, so I can't possibly justify the expense. Honestly I mostly was subscribed to take pressure off of my Claude usage limits, but I've just upped my Claude subscription to the next tier instead.

ETA: I've started an export of all my data. After that's done, I'm going to delete it all from my account (Settings > Data controls) and walk away from the account. I will give this to OpenAI, they make the process of disentangling yourself straightforward and there's integrity in that.

blueblisters 2026-02-28 09:57 UTC link

OpenAI has ~50M paying subscribers driving >$10B in revenue.

You would probably need at least ~1M subscribers to cancel to make this painful.

Probably needs more attention outside of tech circles for that to happen but I suspect this will get drowned out in the face of other stuff.

hedayet 2026-02-28 21:36 UTC link

In case you decide to delete your account, I'd recommend to at least download the saved memories - https://chatgpt.com/#settings/Personalization

ddxv 2026-02-28 06:51 UTC link

What value does this give you? Part of why I deleted my account was I couldn't think of a single thing of value in my chats from the past couple years? Maybe some nostalgia looking at what bugs I was fixing?

layer8 2026-02-28 06:56 UTC link

Even with the same email, probably.

vasco 2026-02-28 06:59 UTC link

The point is it will be autonomous, the prompt could just be 'keep me safe' which will be interpreted who knows how and presumably no further prompting.

tombert 2026-02-28 07:00 UTC link

Same, I had put Claude in my metaphorical shopping cart about two weeks ago but I already had some inertia with ChatGPT + Codex and figured it wouldn't be better enough to justify changing.

That has changed, so I canceled my ChatGPT membership and signed up for Claude. I still have five bucks of credit I bought a year ago for the OpenAI API that I do not believe I can have refunded back, so some of my apps are going to have to stick to OpenAI until those credits run out since I'm not going to just donate five bucks to them.

Playing with it now, I honestly can't tell too much of a difference, which as far as I am concerned is a good thing.

yread 2026-02-28 07:05 UTC link

You can also just dump the localdb

tombert 2026-02-28 07:05 UTC link

Department of Defense: You just bombed the wrong Georgia! The people of Atlanta are furious!

ChatGPT: You're absolutely right, and you're right to call that out. Upon examination it does appear that there might have been a mistake with the coordinates of the bomb. Let's try again, this time we will double check before we launch any missiles! :missile emoji:

thejazzman 2026-02-28 07:18 UTC link

Your credibility is shot when you claim that banks will just give you money. They absolutely do not. In fact, Discover has admitted to me in writing, that they always rule in favor of the Merchant if that Merchant responds to the dispute -- regardless of what their response says.

I've dealt with multiple chargebacks over the years and have only ever lost once -- when the Manager at Lowes' showed a check they wrote me [after I opened the dispute].

They absolutely do not just do anything and "write it off". Please be human and don't just rattle of high-confidence, baseless claims, especially as a giant billboard to Privacy.com

segmondy 2026-02-28 07:22 UTC link

Your last statement is false. A shady merchant never gets to keep the stolen money. The card issuer/bank refunds you immediately because of consumer protection laws. But that charge is immediately charged to the processor. The processor then gets the merchant involved in a dispute process. If the merchant loses the processor charges the merchant. One way they do it is to immediately deduct it from their current processed transactions. If the merchant is no longer processing, they will usually go try to claw it back from their bank account if they have no held reserves, and if they can't get it, they send the merchant to collection. At the end the merchant must eat the cost or the processor. So in your case, the bank didn't eat the cost. OpenAI certainly ate the cost and the chargeback fees.

timpera 2026-02-28 07:28 UTC link

Consider carefully the usage limits of both services before deleting your account (as you cannot create a new one later with the same email). Claude's €20/month sub offers very little and this has unfortunately kept me from switching when I tried earlier this month.

grey-area 2026-02-28 07:32 UTC link

You should also consider ollama and local models.

stinkbeetle 2026-02-28 07:40 UTC link

I think I can guess what training data it used for the wedding droning idea!

AussieWog93 2026-02-28 07:50 UTC link

An even easier way to get into this is simply by downloading a program called LM Studio. You can mount a model and chat to it within 10-15 mins with no experience whatsoever, and no configuration at all.

That said, last time I tried local LLMs (around when gpt-oss came out) it still seemed super gimmicky (or at least niche, I could imagine privacy concerns would be a big deal for some). Very few use cases where you want an LLM but can't benefit immensely from using SOTA models like Claude Opus.

apparent 2026-02-28 07:52 UTC link

I've found the free tier to be extremely limited recently, but in a stochastic way. Some days I ask one friggin question and it tells me I only have two questions left and should upgrade. I just switch to a different model.

eastbound 2026-02-28 08:02 UTC link

> Well, Privacy.com won that dispute and I got that money back.

Well, it seems like ChatGPT’s automated litigation resolution with Privacy.com got lazy. I wonder how a company with an AI can lose in a dispute instead of smokescreening the opponent with legitimate arguments and legalese.

0xbadcafebee 2026-02-28 08:16 UTC link

For non-Mac users:

A laptop with an iGPU and loads of system RAM has the advantage of being able to use system ram in addition to VRAM to load models (assuming your gpu driver supports it, which most do afaik), so load up as much system RAM as you can. The downside is, the system RAM is less fast than dedicated GDDR5. These GPUs would be Radeon 890M and Intel Arc (previous generations are still decently good, if that's more affordable for you).

A laptop with a discrete GPU will not be able to load models as large directly to GPU, but with layer offloading and a quantized MoE model, you can still get quite fast performance with modern low-to-medium-sized models.

Do not get less than 32GB RAM for any machine, and max out the iGPU machine's RAM. Also try to get a bigass NVMe drive as you will likely be downloading a lot of big models, and should be using a VM with Docker containers, so all that adds up to steal away quite a bit of drive space.

Final thought: before you spend thousands on a machine, consider that there are at least a dozen companies that provide non-Anthropic/non-OpenAI models in the cloud, many of which are dirt cheap because of how fast and good open weights are now. Do the math before you purchase a machine; unless you are doing 24/7/365 inference, the cloud is fastly more cost effective.

winternewt 2026-02-28 08:24 UTC link

And if you don't want to buy a Mac? A 80 GB NVidia GPU costs $10,000K (equivalent to 30 years of ChatGPT Plus subscription) and will probably be obsolete in 5-7 years anyway. What are my options if I want a decent coding agent at a reasonable price?

moffkalast 2026-02-28 08:29 UTC link

With this amount of competition it's almost weird to be paying anyone anything when one can just switch between free tiers of GPT, Claude, Gemini, Kimi, Qwen, Deepseek, Le Chat and an endless firehose of local models. The more your usage is randomly spread out, the less each provider can presumably profile you too as nobody has the full picture.

atomicfiredoll 2026-02-28 08:35 UTC link

Thanks. I've been meaning to do this for a couple days and this made it easy enough to do in the moment.

asmor 2026-02-28 08:36 UTC link

The financial barrier is kind of the opposite of "easy to run" to me.

As much as I love owning my stack, you'd have to use so much of this to break even vs an inference provider/aggregator with open frontier-ish models. (and personally, I want to use as little as possible)

computerex 2026-02-28 08:43 UTC link

As someone who desperately wants to use local models, I lament there is no way to use them on consumer hardware for serious coding work. I have a rtx 4070 super ti and I cannot run any large model with enough context and tps compared to a remote offering.

lukan 2026-02-28 08:44 UTC link

If Antrophic would have given in, I would have imagined the dialogs something like in claude CLI:

To complete the mission the war terminal needs to hit a target at XY:

1. yes

2. yes (and don't ask again for strike targets in this session)

3. no

Human in the loop is the term here I think.

(I am really glad they did not give in, but I do assume this is what it will come to anyway)

exe34 2026-02-28 08:48 UTC link

reminds me of the lazy gun in against a dark background!

abustamam 2026-02-28 13:03 UTC link

Curious—does it export memory and stuff? And how do you import it into Claude? Do you tell Claude "here is a data dump?"

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