What ChatGPT Is, What It Costs, and What It Gets Wrong

Your practice business: Mwangaza Hardware

Every assignment in this course serves Mwangaza Hardware, a fictional hardware shop on Kenyatta Avenue in Nakuru. The owner, Peter Kimani, sells cement, paint, plumbing fittings and hand tools to builders and walk-in customers. He writes about fifteen quotations a week by hand, chases three suppliers by email, answers customer questions on WhatsApp and has never produced a monthly report.

Peter approves all prices, discounts, delivery promises and anything sent to a customer. You may prepare drafts and organise information. You may not commit him to a price or a delivery date.

Every name, price, order number and message in this course is invented. Never use a real employer's or client's records for an assignment.

What the tool actually is

ChatGPT predicts text. Given your words, it produces the words that most plausibly follow. That is the whole mechanism, and it explains both the usefulness and the failures.

It is useful because most workplace writing is predictable in shape. A quotation, a follow-up email, a polite refusal and a status report all have a known structure. The tool has seen millions of each and can produce the shape instantly, leaving you to supply the facts and the judgement.

It fails because plausible is not the same as true. Asked for the current price of a bag of cement in Nakuru, it will produce a number that looks entirely reasonable and may be two years out of date or simply made up. It does not know that it does not know.

The practical rule: use it for shape, structure and speed. Supply every fact yourself, or verify every fact it supplies.

Free, paid, and what the difference buys you

There is a free tier and a paid subscription, charged in US dollars and billed to a card — around twenty dollars a month for the main consumer plan at the time of writing. Prices and plan names change often, so check the current figures on the provider's own pricing page before you pay, and work out the shilling cost at the day's exchange rate plus whatever your bank charges for a foreign transaction.

The free tier is enough to complete this entire course. What paying typically adds is a stronger model, higher usage limits, file uploads and image generation. For a Kenyan freelancer, the honest test is simple: if the tool saves you more than one paid hour a month, the subscription pays for itself. If you are not yet billing clients, stay on the free tier.

A practical obstacle worth naming: a dollar subscription needs a card that works for international payments. Many Kenyan debit cards do not, by default. If that applies to you, finish the course on the free tier rather than buying a prepaid workaround you do not understand.

Where it is dangerous

Do not use AI output as the final word on tax, law, medicine or anything a regulator governs. It will state the wrong KRA deadline or the wrong penalty with total confidence. For Kenyan rules, check the portal or ask a qualified person. Kaziiko lists verified experts for exactly this reason.

Do not paste a customer's KRA PIN, ID number, phone number, bank details or medical information into a free AI tool. Free tiers may use your conversations to improve the model. Replace real details with placeholders before pasting, and check the tool's data settings for an option to exclude your chats from training.

Do not let it make a commitment. It will happily write 'your order will be delivered tomorrow' for a delivery nobody has confirmed. That sentence, sent to a customer, is your problem and not the tool's.