Paying $20/month for ChatGPT Plus or even $200 for ChatGPT Pro might not make financial sense for your usage pattern. Here I will show you how to build your own clone and potentially save money. Here is what I built:
The Economics Might Work in Your Favor
OpenAI's pricing creates an interesting opportunity. ChatGPT Plus charges $20 monthly regardless of usage. The API charges per token consumed. However, the costs are so low you will end up spending only a few dollars every month, or zero dollars if you let OpenAI to use your data for training. Here is my OpenAI usage cost for September so far. It is $0.
GPT-5 costs $1.25 per million input tokens ($0.125 for cached input) and $10 per million tokens for output. And if you enable training data usage you can cut these costs to $0. For light to moderate users, the math works out favorably.
Customization Opportunities
Building a clone means you're now responsible for uptime, security, and maintenance. ChatGPT Plus includes infrastructure, support, and features like web browsing and image generation that the basic API doesn't provide. Your clone will be simpler but also more limited. However, building your own clone also means more customization possibilities that ChatGPT Plus doesn't offer. For example, the complete code that I will share uses the Python Flask web framework and it allows you to add any type of widgets or other customizations to the chatbot. You could build features like automatic conversation tagging, export functionality for specific formats, or integration with your existing tools and databases.
How to build the ChatGPT clone
The technical stack is straightforward: Python with the OpenAI library for the backend, Flask for the web framework, and basic frontend code. PythonAnywhere offers free hosting if you want to make the app public.
I'll provide the complete code implementation after walking through the architecture, so you can see exactly what's involved before committing time to this project.
All you need is to create an OpenAI API account and get an OpenAI API key which is easy and straightforward. Here are the steps:
Getting started with OpenAI's API takes just a few minutes:
Create your account at platform.openai.com - click "Sign up" and use email, Google, or Microsoft login
Verify your email through the confirmation link OpenAI sends
Generate an API key in the dashboard's API keys section - copy it immediately since OpenAI only shows it once
Add payment method in the billing section - required even though new accounts get $5 in free credits
Set spending limits to $10-20 monthly while testing to prevent unexpected charges
(Optional) Cut down the costs up to zero by allowing OpenAI to use your data. Go to https://platform.openai.com/usage and Settings → Data Controls → Sharing → “Share inputs and outputs with OpenAI“ and select “Enabled For Selected Projects”.
Complete code
Here is the complete Python code to have your own ChatGPT clone up and running: