The SDOpenAI Access plugin uses the OpenAI API to provide “tokens” which means the question or prompts that you use, and return results (again measured in tokens) from the OpenAI system. You are charged by the number of millions of tokens you provide to the AI which roughly equates to the number of words in your prompts and context content.

I’ve put $10 of credit on my OpenAI API account and so far I’ve made 9 requests consisting of about 18 thousand tokens sent. There have not yet been any charges against my 10 dollars for this. The model I’ve used is the cheapest model gpt-4o-mini at $0.15 per million tokens.

To give some context, if I started asking the most expensive model allowed by the plugin: gpt-4, I’d be spending $30 per million tokens. I think these options of which models you have available change depending on what is available on the OpenAI API site.

Different models have different purposes and can do different things. For a primer on what the different models do check out this article: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7864572-what-is-the-chatgpt-model-selector

Basically, you are asking questions of different “brains” so to speak when you select different models. The brains work in different ways and are trained on different material. Some of the brains are more sophisticated and think longer than others.

Ok, so that’s just how I’ve used OpenAI so far. You should also know that there are many other companies out there with their own models that have been setup in different ways. So there are a LOT of options out there, but for the purposes of the SDOpenAI plugin you can only connect to OpenAI and only have a minimal set of the latest models to select from.

Ok, so what are other ways to use OpenAI? ChatGPT is something everyone has heard of. ChatGPT is to AI as Kleenex is to tissues. ChatGPT was the first app to allow users to ask open ended questions of a Large Language Model (LLM) and experiment with it to see how it would respond.

There are now a few ways to interact with different models.

There’s ChatGPT free which is as the name implies “free”. You can setup an openAI account and ask as many questions as you’d like but it is much more limited than the other options.

ChatGPT Plus is a $20 / user / month app that has more models to choose from and you can use more options to interact with it like speaking to it.

ChatGPT Pro is $200 / user / month and allows almost unrestricted access to everything ChatGPT has to offer

ChatGPT Teams requires at least 2 users and costs if purchased annually $25 / user / month ($300 / user / year) and has more options than ChatGPT Plus, but not as many as ChatGPT Pro.

This is all as of May 2025. Things change fast so wait a month and this will be quite out of date.

ChatGPT has it’s own interface via the web site. OpenAI API which is what the SDOpenAI plugin uses costs money per request and is used by programs developed by 3rd party plugins.

I hope this helps provide a little primer on AI services in general and very specific to OpenAI.