So if you don't want to pay for a subscription I think you can get some free use of anthropic's most capable model (Opus) - I don't know the status of what you can get for free from openai.
The opinion of AI reddit is only really going to get you so far because the capabilities of the models are wildly different for different use cases, so you really need to be able to try it out for yourself and see if it can do what you need it to do.
[1] Somewhere like https://openai.com/chatgpt/pricing/ https://claude.ai/ or similar
The other way is to get an API key from OpenAI or Anthropic and then, you can pay per token which is incredibly cheap - load it up with $5 and it can easily last you months if you're not using it much.
As a dev, I cannot recommend these better models enough. The ROI on my $10-$20 that I spend every month is easily in hundreds to thousands of dollars.
It spectacularly fails at slight variations of the goat/cabbage/lion/river problem, it cannot solve spatial or mathematical questions reliably.
Do some of the researchers that hype up ChatGPT get access to a special version? I'm not inclined to buy a subscription to find out and the AI Reddits aren't that positive either.