this is still how I am with pretty much all genAI. People on this site say it's great, but a lot of people on this site have big incentives to hold that view. I have found the free models to be useless, and sufficiently useless that the paid models -- which are not cheap -- are not enticing.

Maybe I'd be more willing to pay per token if I could get a refund for all the tokens it outputs that are wrong?

Maybe my opinion of genAI will change if my employer ever allows us to use it and I am able to use a state of the art model on someone else's dime, but I'm not risking $60 or whatever to find out the performance is only moderately better than GPT3

claude.ai is free (there are limits per day per account). It's not a "free [tier] model", it's their best model and (on most tasks) imo the best all around llm. The worst aspect I'd say is how outdated its information is becoming. Anything post 2023 you likely need to provide source material.

using openai or anthropic to my hearts content, configured via api to my editor, i didn't go over $10/mo -- vs $20/mo for their regular product that hit me with rate limits