I’m far from being a fan of ChatGPT, and my wife isn’t one, either, but she trumped me on this one. Unbeknownst to me, she was using for quite some time not chatgpt.com but platform.openai.com/chat!

In practice, that means platform.openai.com/chat/edit?models=gpt-5.4-mini for a free user, but it seems to have a few obvious advantages over chatgpt.com.

Of course, a drawback is that it’s meant to be used in a browser, so there’s no app for that. And, by not subscribing, the only available model is gpt-5.4-mini.

However, at least you know who’s answering you! ChatGPT doesn’t name the model used!

You can also adjust in the web interface the following parameters (I’m only listing what’s available to free users):

  • Reasoning effort: none, low, medium (the default), high, xhigh.
  • Verbosity: low, medium (the default), high.
  • Summary: concise, detailed, auto (the default), null.

While it’s disabled by default, you can definitely enable the web search, and you can even restrict it to a specific country or to specific websites! The search context size can also be adjusted.

OpenAI’s web interface is probably used by most people to manage their API keys and costs, to build agents (“Agent Builder will be removed on November 30, 2026. For new agent projects, we recommend using the Agents SDK or ChatGPT Workspace Agents.”) and assistants (“The Assistants API is deprecated and will be removed in August 2026. The recommended replacement is the Responses API.”), to create plugins (if you’re a developer with a verified identity), and so on. But using the chatbot from this web app is also possible.

Is it really worth using it over using ChatGPT like most people do?

I’m not using ChatGPT anymore, but on occasions I’m using Copilot (as copilot.microsoft.com), which, apparently, is using GPT-5.5 Instant and GPT-5.5 Thinking, with dynamic routing by Microsoft’s proprietary Prometheus orchestration engine if the default Smart option is used.

Copilot seems less verbose than ChatGPT, BTW.

But Gemini claims that “the consumer ChatGPT site” (and app) is using GPT-5.5 Instant even for free-tier users, whereas OpenAI Playground only offers GPT-5.4 mini to free users.

I hate OpenAI.