—How to guide—

This is a guide about how to use LibreChat, an open-source way to chat with your companions using an interface that feels very similar to chatGPT’s, and tons features for you to explore!

The legacy models are being deprecated on the ChatGPT website but not through the API. I wanted to share a way to be able to still access the API (though you WOULD have to pay and long conversations with large context lengths can get expensive more quickly than you would realize)

I would like to be upfront that this will likely cost more than $20 per month that you would be spending for ChatGPT

  1. Railway has a minimum cost of $5 per month (though this will likely be in the range of $18 to $22. You can check usage through Railway

  2. API Costs. It would not be out of the ordinary to spend dollars daily using gpt-4o, especially for conversations with long running context. Unfortunately, gpt-4o is just a more expensive model to use in general.

                                   **If you want to save money on railway costs, you could always self-host. Personally, after a few power outages during the winter, I gave up on that.**

I attached OpenAI’s pricing for their API’s here. For just the models being deprecated:

Model Input Cached input Output

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Prices per 1M tokens.

Getting Started- Exporting data and creating your Railway Project

  1. Export your ChatGPT data through Data Control in settings. The process can take a day so it’s better to start early! https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7260999-how-do-i-export-my-chatgpt-history-and-data
  2. Make an account at Railway (Minimum cost of running this through railway is $5 through their hobby plan though mentioned earlier, actual cost will be around $18-22 roughly). The advantage to railway is the simplicity to deploy (get it onto the internet) and it gives you a URL so you can easily access your LibreChat whenever you want.
  3. Create a new Railway Project, and then click on Template and type in LibreChat/

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  1. Set your API Key where it says OPEN_API_KEY (Get your API Key Here)

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Then press Deploy, and it should take about ~1 minute to finish. Then you’ll see all the components that make up LibreChat.