Starting ChatGPT account business: cost 3 yuan and sell it for 30 yuan, some people earn 200,000 yuan a month

Behind the ChatGPT account vendors is the strong demand for AIGC tools, and various needs cannot be met by domestic large-scale model products for the time being.

Written by: Kyle

During the hot months of ChatGPT, excitement and anxiety constituted all living beings. On the bright side, a large number of technology companies and famous celebrities squeezed into the large-scale model track; secretly, some ordinary people were looking for new opportunities to make money under the wind.

Li Mingfei is one of these ordinary people. He started selling ChatGPT accounts in February. The "batch number" cost two and three yuan, and he could sell it at a high price of 99 yuan at first. When ChatGPT's App was launched in the United States, the market price of the account dropped to 30 yuan, and the profit margin was still considerable.

The media campaign and big bosses’ publicity are free advertisements for “account sellers”. When the giants drilled deep into the big model and haven't seen the "money back", these people have already made a profit.

On various e-commerce platforms, Li Mingfei hides in Tibet. Although the store disappears once in ten and a half months, the average monthly sales volume is still five to six thousand, the monthly turnover exceeds 150,000 yuan, and the cost of obtaining an account is just over 10,000 yuan. However, the promotion fee is the bulk, accounting for more than half of the revenue. There is also a lot of traffic and a wide range of channels, and the net profit in a single month can reach 200,000.

But this is not a stable and long-term income. If the popularity of ChatGPT cannot be continued, the business will become tepid; if there is an account, there will be no traffic, and the money will not be earned. In the past period of time, the blowout of domestic large-scale models once made Li Mingfei and his colleagues worry about affecting sales. "Fortunately, ChatGPT is still strong, and those who should buy it have to buy it."

Behind the ChatGPT account vendors is people's strong demand for AIGC tools, and various needs cannot be met by domestic large-scale model products for the time being.

30 yuan ChatGPT account gets less than 3 yuan

On May 19th, OpenAI put ChatGPT on the IOS App Store in the United States. The news of the mobile terminal's launch quickly spread throughout the country, and it also reached a group of niche businesses. OpenAI, which is 14,000 kilometers away, made a move on the other side of the Pacific Ocean to bring business opportunities to these businesses.

Li Mingfei is one of them. In February of this year, he quickly felt the AI trend that ChatGPT poured into the world. Although he did not understand technology and was unable to rush to the front line for research and development, when the big names such as Meituan Wang Huiwen and Sinovation Works Li Kaifu slammed their cups, he Start to think about how to make a fortune in the wind.

"At that time, most people could only watch others use ChatGPT, and they were eager to try it out. However, there was no way to register an account in China, so I thought selling accounts would definitely make money." In this way, Li Mingfei started his account selling business.

"In the beginning, it sold quickly, and you don't need traffic. The demand is there, and a wholesale account is enough." Talking about the business during that period, he couldn't hide his excitement, and he wanted to express his feelings to everyone who approached him. Quickly, "However, during this period of time, the energy seems to have passed, and the demand is obviously less, and there must be traffic to sell well."

But the popularity of ChatGPT has been wave after wave. Now, the new hot spot is the launch of the ChatGPT APP, which is not only more convenient to use, but also supports voice input. "There are more orders these days," said Li Mingfei, who had another way to make money.

The extra way to make money in his mouth is to sell App Store accounts in the United States, because currently ChatGPT can only be downloaded in Apple’s US store, “This is not expensive, 18 yuan.”

ChatGPT is available on the US App Store

Li Mingfei introduced that what he is selling now includes ordinary ChatGPT accounts, which is the free version of the official website, which uses the GPT-3.5 large model and costs 30 yuan; and the ChatGPT Plus account that uses the GPT-4 model, which is divided into shared version and The exclusive editions are priced at 80 yuan and 200 yuan respectively; there is also a sharing member of the AI drawing tool Midjourney, which sells for 40 yuan.

"Ordinary ChatGPT accounts sell the most, and the price is cheap, and they can be used all the time for 30 yuan," Li Mingfei said. If you buy more, it will be cheaper. He asked Li Mingfei about the price by saying "want to be an agent", and he quickly gave the base price: 7 yuan.

From 30 yuan to 7 yuan, Li Mingfei was more majestic than the hard-working anchors in the live broadcast room, and he took the initiative to hit a "fracture". Not only that, Li Mingfei gave a supply price of 160 yuan for ChatGPT Plus, which officially charges $20 (about 141 yuan) per month. However, he reminded, "Plus, you try to push as little as possible, this thing is expensive, and it is very troublesome for someone to ask you for a refund."

Li Mingfei reflected that because ChatGPT Plus has an extra step of recharging overseas accounts, if there is a problem with the recharging channel, the account may be blocked. If the customer finds that it is blocked after a few days, he will definitely find the after-sales service, which is too troublesome. But it's expensive and few people buy it.

When asked "Can ordinary accounts still be cheaper?" Li Mingfei said that they can give 3.5 yuan, but they are registered in batches by machines, and there is a risk of banning accounts. "Manual registration is a bit more expensive, but basically they will not be banned."

After some conversation, Li Mingfei confessed that he was also looking for someone to get the number. Due to the large amount, the cost averaged about 2.3 yuan. According to this cost price, one account sells for 30 yuan, and one meal of "pig knuckle rice" is enough.

"There is a peer with a net profit of 200,000 a month"

Judging from Li Mingfei's description, the profit margin of selling ChatGPT accounts is very considerable. But how much you can earn depends on the sales volume.

Li Mingfei said that his main sales channel is a certain treasure store. For this reason, he also found someone to develop a simple webpage. If someone asks through the communication software, he can place an order directly on the webpage.

"Looking at the traffic, when it is good, it can sell 1,000 pieces in a few days. If the online store is not blocked, it can sell five or six thousand pieces a month." The price corresponding to this quantity is 30 yuan. "If it is cheap, you can sell more. It’s a lot, but it’s not worth selling at a low price.” Based on this calculation, his monthly turnover can reach more than 150,000 yuan.

"Then you can easily earn hundreds of thousands a month?" Seeing such speculation, Li Mingfei talked about the difficulty, "E-commerce platforms still need to place advertisements, and you think it's pure profit." He revealed that if you want to sell more , You have to spend money to put in the priority display store, "It means that when others search for keywords, they can see your store, and the promotion cost accounts for more than half of the turnover."

According to him, the monthly sales are 150,000 yuan, and the promotion fee alone costs more than 70,000 yuan, which is far higher than the cost of obtaining an account. However, this promotion fee is not a fixed expenditure. The promotion fee is directly proportional to the traffic, "it is impossible to lose money."

Reselling ChatGPT accounts on e-commerce platforms is actually not that simple. The customer service of a certain treasure told "Metaverse Daily Explosion" that the platform does not allow ChatGPT accounts to be listed, but there are no relevant regulations for the time being, but only said that "publishing prohibited products may lead to risks such as product removal."

Li Mingfei also knows that the platform itself does not allow the sale of ChatGPT accounts. "I found out that the store will be closed, and it is useless to pay the promotion fee. People look down on your money." He said that he has sold accounts for several months and has not known that he has been blocked. No matter how many shops he bought, he could only "play a guerrilla attack", and had to change the name of the shop in ten days and a half months.

Li Mingfei also tried other platforms, but the review was stricter, "it can't be done". For example, if you search for "ChatGPT" in Xianyu, the first result displayed is women's shoes named "notre chat".

"If you start selling now, it's still a bit late." Li Mingfei said, more people are selling now, and the demand is gradually decreasing. Basically, there are people who want to have an account. "It's better to just start. At that time, it was still expensive to sell. One account could be sold for 99 yuan. Some colleagues made a net profit of 200,000 yuan a month."

In Li Mingfei's view, there is actually no threshold for selling an account, it is nothing more than the cost of obtaining an account. He has also tried to register an account with a platform that accepts foreign mobile phone verification codes, and the cost is only one or two yuan, but it is too troublesome to register one by one, and it is not as convenient as the "batch number". "This matter is not so stable, you will know it after doing it. Now many channels cannot be promoted, and it is easy to handle with accurate traffic."

Domestic large model "does not affect business"

During the few months when Li Mingfei sold his account, domestic technology companies were also engaged in an arms race. Baidu, Alibaba and other giants successively released "domestic versions of ChatGPT", which are all aligned with OpenAI.

On March 16, Baidu launched Wenxin Yiyan and opened it for testing; on April 7, Ali’s version of ChatGPT product Tongyi Qianwen opened an internal test invitation; two days later, 360’s big prediction model “360 Zhinao” opened for appointment. Since then, domestic large-scale models have entered a blowout period, and a large number of large models and ChatGPT-like tools such as Huawei's "Pangu", SenseTime's "Consultation", Going out to ask "Sequence Monkey", and HKUST Xunfei's "Spark Cognition" have appeared. Dazzling, dizzying.

The era of domestic large-scale models kicked off, which once made Li Mingfei and his colleagues feel uneasy. "We communicated with each other, and we were a little worried that no one would buy an account after the domestic ChatGPT came out."

What caught Li Mingfei's attention the most was undoubtedly Wen Xin's press conference. After all, Baidu is the first and the company that is most capable of doing a good job of dialogue robots in the eyes of the outside world.

Li Mingfei was deeply impressed by the scene that day, "Li Yanhong released a pre-recorded video, and the comment section was full of scolding." Before the press conference was over, he quit the live broadcast room, feeling confident.

Wen Xin Yi Yan press conference

In the follow-up, Wenxin opened the test with a word, and more and more people used this large domestic model, but various cases of rollovers were also uploaded on the Internet. Li Mingfei didn't care about it until a technology company released a large model in the future. He believed that no one could shake ChatGPT's benchmark position for the time being.

Li Mingfei said that although domestic large-scale models can basically be used for free, when they first came out, many of them required an invitation code to participate in the test, which means that there is still a threshold to get an account. "But you have seen who sells domestic accounts, and foreign accounts are still more awesome than domestic ones."

In Li Mingfei's perception, the concentration of domestic large-scale models has no obvious impact on his sales business. Even if the subsequent sales decline, he does not think it is the domestic large-scale models that have stolen the limelight, but that there are more of his sales colleagues. , It also shows that domestic users have a great demand for ChatGPT, "Everyone will only use the best one for this thing, after all, it doesn't cost much."

Another merchant who sold ChatGPT accounts also felt the same way, "We sell ours, they sell theirs, there is no conflict."

Worried about the decline in popularity and legal risks

Although the launch of the ChatGPT APP has attracted another wave of customers, Li Mingfei also faintly feels that the popularity will not last forever. Coupled with the stalking and interception of various platforms, he predicts that this business will become more and more difficult to do.

"Eating the first wave of dividends is the fastest way to make money in everything. This is not a long-term solution. One day is one day. If you can't sell it, you can withdraw." Li Mingfei can think about it, and he can catch up with this wave and make some money. Very satisfied, besides, in his eyes, this is not a "secure" deal.

"Unsafe" is mainly concerned about legal risks. Li Mingfei strictly abides by a bottom line set by himself: not to sell virtual network tools. In Internet slang, this tool has various homonyms. Since IPs in mainland China cannot access ChatGPT, users need a virtual network to use it. Li Mingfei has encountered numerous inquiries about this tool, and he replied "not for sale".

Domestic IP cannot access the ChatGPT website

Searching public information, there are many cases in China where people have been sentenced to criminal punishment for illegally making profits by providing "over the wall" services. A ruling made by the Guangzhou Baiyun Court in 2022 showed that, without the approval of the telecommunications authority, a gang operated a "over the wall" website that could evade supervision and access the overseas Internet without authorization, charging package fees for Users provide "wall circumvention" services and illegally profit from them. His behavior constituted the crime of providing intrusion and illegal control of computer information system programs and tools. The main criminal was sentenced to three years in prison, suspended for three years and six months, and fined 50,000 yuan.

Even if you don't touch the risky business, simply selling ChatGPT accounts also has the risk of crossing the line.

Zhu Jie, senior partner of Tahota (Chongqing) Law Firm, said that this kind of buying and selling behavior may constitute illegal operations such as illegal operations. ChatGPT's genuine services are provided by overseas institutions, and it is expressly forbidden to use virtual private networks to provide cross-border business activities without the approval of relevant Chinese departments. If you register an account on a dedicated network, without the relevant national administrative license, you may be subject to administrative punishment or even criminal punishment if you operate and sell foreign accounts without authorization.

Li Mingfei and his colleagues are also paying attention to this information. "So far, I haven't heard of anyone having an accident because of selling GPT accounts." He is still vigilant and admits that this is not a long-term and safe business. The ChatGPT APP is online, and he predicts that the popularity will become calmer over time, just like the ChatGPT web page. "Li Mingfeis" are also looking at the next stop, waiting for another useful overseas AI product to appear. In their eyes, it is an opportunity that ordinary people can seize in the wind.

(Li Mingfei is a pseudonym in the article.)