I bet you saw the warning message "You've reached your GPT-4o limit." at least once. It's an annoying roadblock, especially when you rely on ChatGPT for urgent work or study tasks. But don't worry, there are a few ways to keep the your conversations going.

In this article, we will explain why you might be seeing this message and will provide some legal hints on how to bypass GPT-4o restrictions.

Why Do You See "You've reached your GPT-4o limit"?

GPT-4o is a powerful large language model from OpenAI. Arguably, now in April 2025, it’s still the most used AI in the world. It's incredibly smart and rather fast compared to many competitors, but it takes a lot of resources to run. To manage this, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has set limits on how much GPT-4o users can access.

There are the most common reasons why you might see the message saying that you’ve hit GPT 4 limits:

1. Free User Limits:

OpenAI offers different levels of access to GPT-4o and other models, such as o1. If you use the free version of ChatGPT, you are not provided with access to GPT-4o and have a limited number of messages which you can send per short period of time with less intelligent but faster model GPT-4o mini. This limit is designed to ensure that any of millions free users gets an even opportunity to use the platform.

What can you do?

• Upgrade to ChatGPT Plus: subscribing to ChatGPT+ significantly increases the usage limits. The Plus plan provides access to GPT-4o and allows to have longer conversations.

• Just wait: free users usually get their message limits reset after a certain period (like 3-4 hours). Be patient, and you'll be able to chat again soon.

2. A Temporary Glitch

Sometimes, the ChatGPT limit message might be just a bug, especially for free users. It really happens from time to time. If you think this might be your case, there are a few things you can try:

• Refresh the page: simply refreshing your browser window can sometimes clear the error.

• Log out and log in again: sometimes we just need to follow advice from “The IT Crowd” sitcom. Logging out of your ChatGPT account and logging back in might reset the system and remove the error.

• Clear cache in your browser: your browser's cache might be holding onto outdated information. Clearing it may help resolve the issue.

3. High Traffic

When many people are trying to use ChatGPT simulaneously, the system can get overloaded. This might lead to temporary restrictions or slower response times, sometimes showing up as the "You've reached your GPT-4o limit" message.

What can you do?

• Try again later: If you're not in a rush, try using ChatGPT during off-peak hours (like early mornings or late nights) when fewer people are online.

• Upgrade to ChatGPT Plus: paid users have a priority over free users. That means if the platform is experiencing high demand at the moment, paid subscribers will be much less affected.

More Ways to Use GPT-4o Limit-Free

If you need to use GPT-4o without restrictions and limitations, consider some of these options:

1. Explore Writingmate

Writingmate AI offers access to literally all best AI models available in 2025. That’s not a joke: any model from GPT 4o to Gemini 2.5 and Llama 4. You can try out many other AI models too, making it a very useful platform for all your AI needs. It also features a Model Comparison tool, allowing you to directly compare GPT-4o vs Claude 3.7 Sonnet and other models to define the best fit.

The platform offers limited free access, with different paid plans starting at $9.99/month.

How to find the Writingmate chatbot?

• Navigate to the Writingmate app and sign up with your email.

2. Check Out Telegram Bots & Apps

Some Telegram bots and mini applications offer access to GPT-4o. You can interact with these bots directly through the Telegram app.

How to find them?

• Type the model you would like to use in Search panel and explore provided options.

3. Check out trial subscriptions from different GPT wrappers.

Many platforms, so-called wrappers, provide access to different GPT models including 4o. Since the API requests sent to OpenAI endpoint by this model is expensive, don’t expect these services will be absolutely free. However, many of them provide subscriptions with a free trial period which means you can get access paid models for free for some time (usually 3 or 7 days). If you decided to give them a try and don’t want to pay, don’t forget to unsubscribe before trial ends.

How to find them?

• Try searching something like “gpt 4 for free” or “gpt 4o free trial” on Google. 

Understanding of Different OpenAI Models

AI models are like different tools, each with its own strengths and weakneses. While GPT-4o is powerful, it's not the only one out there. You might come across other models, like GPT-3.5, on various platforms. Let's break down the differences in simple terms:

• GPT-3.5: quite old but very fast model. Was replaced by GPT-4o mini.

• GPT-4 and 4 Turbo: the older generations of top-tier models. Was replaced by GPT-4o and o1.

• GPT-4o: Advanced model and the most popular one. It's great at coming up with creative ideas, being accurate, and handling tough or complex questions.

• GPT-4o mini: the younger brother of the 4o. It works much faster than bigger 4o and great for everyday task, unless you don't to find the answer to The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. 

• O1 and O1 mini: the models for reasoning tasks, very complex calculations and multi-tasking. Use them if you want to get a step-by-step guide on how to become a billionaire in one year.

• O3 mini: the newest, the fastest, and the most cost-efficient model among reasoning models. To put it simply, this is the most advanced among small models.

• GPT‑4.5 - the largest OpenAI's model so far, accessible as a research preview.

Our recommendation: it’s worth trying different models and define which one works best for your needs.

FAQ

To help you navigate through the information provided in the article, we put important questions in a short and sweet FAQ section.

1. Is there a limit on ChatGPT?

If you use the chat.openai.com platform, the answer would be "Yes". Even if you subscribed to the Plus plan that costs $20/month. The only plan with (almost) no limits is the Pro plan as of April 2025.

Let's clarify ChatGPT pricing options:

• Free user: limited access to GPT-4o mini, limited access GPT-4o (current numbers are not provided, but fewer compared to Plus plan), no access to O1, no access to Deep Research* functionality.

• Plus plan user ($20/mo): unlimited access to GPT-4o mini, 80 messages every 3 hours for GPT-4o, 40 messages every 3 hours for GPT-4, 50 messages/week with OpenAI o1-preview, 50 messages/day with o1-mini, limited usage of Deep Research.

• Pro plan user ($200/mo): unlimited access to all models.

*Deep Research is OpenAI's functionality of multi-step research on the internet for complex tasks available for paid users.

If you got your own OpenAI API keys installed, you will be limited only with the money you have on your account. In this case, you will not be having message limits until your account is above zero. Check the pricing for API access.

2. Why may I reach ChatGPT message limits?

There are several possible reasons behind that:
1. You are a free user that means you have fever number of messages per period of time available, compared to paid users.
2. You faced with a bug ot glitch by ChatGPT platform - this sometimes happens.
3. You are trying to use the platfrom during high demand and the system is overloaded.

3. When does ChatGPT limit reset?

The message limits on chat.openai.com usually reset every 3-4 hours. Read more in

4. Is there an unlimited version of ChatGPT?

Yes, ChatGPT provides extremely pricey ($200/month) but unlimited plan called Pro. The pricing can be found here. If you look for more affordable option in a bit to bypass ChatGPT limitations, try Writingmate. This platform, despite having some message limits, has seven GPT models in the list, besides dozens of other advanced AIs. This means you’ll be able to use top-notch LLMs all the time, 24/7.

Final Words

Please keep in mind: so-called battle of AI models is at its highest boiling point right now.  New AIs are announced every week, AI developers have become Big Tech companies with their valuation growing by leaps and bounds.  As a real-life example: while we were preparing this article for you, Google released its new AI called Gemini 2.0.  And this new version of Gemini has outperformed both GPT-4 and o1 models by OpenAI models by total summary of different scores. 

What does this mean for all of us, you may say?  It's a high time now to explore and test different AIs. Of course, you can fully focus on ChatGPT, but we recommend keeping an eye on this engaging AI battle and exploring the innovations by yourself. This way, you'll always be "in the loop" and can find the most effective AIs available on the market for your specific tasks. You can choose the single subscriptions to services such as Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude, or stick to all-in-one platforms like Writingmate.ai – it's entirely up to you. See you and good luck!

AI Models Leaderboard by Chatbot Arena, as of April 2025.

Important information

The links to resources we think might be helpful for you.

ChatGPT
- Official website of OpenAI.
- Pricing.
- Message limits per plan.
- Model list.

Writingmate
- Official website.
- Pricing and limits per plan.
- Supported models.

Chatbot Arena
- Up-to-date Leaderboard of best AIs.