Rewriting your emails with AI to be professional

Rewriting your emails with AI to be

Transparency - Our Costs

PolitePost was never intended to be profitable, but I also didn't expect it to become so popular and cost so much. We ask for coffee donations to keep the site running. We're very thankful to everyone who donates, and your generosity has kept my personal contributions within reason. What we offer in return is transparency.

PolitePost uses OpenAI's GPT Completion and Chat API to run. Their pricing is located at: https://openai.com/pricing. Our web hosting is negligible. Since PolitePost started in December 2022, our monthly costs with OpenAI are as follows:

December 2022 - $90.77
January 2023 - $239.76
February 2023 - $302.14
March 2023 - $326.95
April 2023 - $326.90

OpenAI charges depending on the selected model and API. We are currently using the gpt-3.5-turbo model paired with their Chat API to produce quality rewrites. Open source and lower models have not generated good results even if they are substantially cheaper and acceptable for some use cases. Prior to March 2023, we were using the da-vinci-003 model on the Completion API. It was 10x our current price but performs very similarly in our tests. In March 2023, we switched back and forth between da-vinci-003 and gpt-3.5-turbo to properly tune our prompts to get similar results. We also opened an additional page to use the gpt-4 model. GPT-4 is a substantial 15x our standard costs, and frankly, has not performed very well in comparison; giving results that are sometimes worse than our baseline.

To add to the confusion, OpenAI charges per "token". The word count of your original email and the rewrite are added together and converted to tokens. It is roughly 4 characters a token, or about 75 words for every 100 tokens. The longer your email, the higher the charge. We've limited your submissions to 2,000 characters to keep prices low and ensure everyone has a fair chance to use PolitePost.

Transparency - Privacy and Your Data

PolitePost has ZERO interest in your data, including your email content. However, we use OpenAI's APIs to run our service. We have a pretty short privacy policy available for those looking for some assurance. But we want to just share our practices here in plain English.

Our Tech Stack

PolitePost essentially is a front end webpage that sends API calls directly from your computer to OpenAI. We run it through our own backend to prevent abuse. We do not cache or store any of your data, we simply act as a middle man and pass it through. Our backend is only there to filter some obvious hate messages, trim down on longer emails, and throttle usage if there are too many requests going at a time.

OpenAI - Opt-Out

There are some concerns that OpenAI uses data. Their privacy policy states that they collect personal information for several standard reasons (providing the services, communication, prevent fraud/criminal activity/misuse, comply with legal obligations). From our perspective, the jitters are around their ability to improve their services, conduct research and to develop new services. Everyone has taken this to mean that they will take your data and use it to train their next model.

We take your privacy seriously. PolitePost has undergone an opt-out process with OpenAI to ensure that your data will NOT be used in model training. OpenAI's latest privacy policies (as of early March 2023) also seem to be stricter around what OpenAI can do. While we still recommend you do not use PolitePost for top secret, highly sensitive information, we have done everything we can as a small site to ensure your data is private.

Web Analytics

During your use of PolitePost, we don't require any logins or credentials. We don't keep track of any of your identifiers, however, we do use analytics on our platform. We specifically chose Cloudflare Web Analytics to give us very basic data from a vendor who stresses privacy-first. They claim that their model is not driven by ad revenue, and that they don't track anything to do with you such as IP address or other identifiers. From what we've seen, we're basically able to see the number of views and what country the user is from.