I stopped paying OpenAI because they went down or were "too busy" so much of the time I wanted to use it. Bard (or more so the VertexAI APIs) are always up and reliable and do not require a monthly fee, just the per call
Not the person you asked, but (paid) ChatGPT was down so often for me that I almost cancelled... Until I switched to connecting via VPN. Only one outage since then For some reason whole swaths of the Spectrum IP block in Gilroy has trouble.