ChatGPT vs Rezi: Free or $29/mo?

I get this question almost weekly now: “Alex, should I just use free ChatGPT for my CV, or is Rezi worth $29 a month?”

Fair question. And the honest answer surprises people, because Rezi is built on top of OpenAI — the same company that makes ChatGPT. So you’re not really comparing two different AIs. You’re comparing a free open tool to a paid wrapper around that same tool.

Whether the wrapper is worth $29 a month depends entirely on one thing: whether you can prompt.

One-minute verdict

If you’re comfortable writing detailed instructions to an AI and iterating on the output, ChatGPT free wins. You’ll get a better CV, you’ll learn a skill that compounds across every job application, and you’ll save $348 a year.

If prompting feels like a foreign language and you want guardrails — pre-built templates, hard-coded ATS rules, one-click generation — Rezi is worth one month at $29. Subscribe, write three CV variations, cancel. Don’t pay for it ongoing.

The wrong choice is paying for Rezi for six months because you couldn’t be bothered to learn ChatGPT in twenty minutes.

The engine reality

This is the bit nobody tells you upfront, so let me say it plainly. Rezi calls OpenAI’s API to generate your bullets. Their summary writer, their keyword optimisation, their “AI Magic Write” button — all of it talks to the same models that power ChatGPT.

I don’t say that to attack Rezi. It’s a reasonable product decision; OpenAI’s models are excellent and building your own from scratch would be daft. But it changes the question from “which AI is better?” to “what am I actually paying $29 a month for?”

The answer is three things. One, prompt engineering — Rezi has written and tuned the prompts so you don’t have to. Two, templates — clean ATS-safe layouts that won’t break when a parser ingests them. Three, structure — they constrain the output to CV-shaped responses so you never get a chatty paragraph where you wanted a bullet.

What you’re not paying for is intelligence. The brain is the same. If you tell ChatGPT exactly what Rezi tells ChatGPT, you get the same quality of output. The only difference is who writes the instructions.

I’ve tested this. I took a candidate’s old CV, ran it through Rezi, and then ran the same CV through ChatGPT free with a properly constrained prompt. The bullets came out 90% the same. Slight differences in word choice, near-identical structure, similar keyword density.

That’s the engine reality. Now the only question is whether you want to write the instructions yourself or pay someone to write them for you.

Pricing

ChatGPT has a free tier that’s genuinely usable for CV work. You get GPT-5 access with daily limits, file uploads, and conversation history. For one CV — even three or four CV variations across a job hunt — the free tier is enough. ChatGPT Plus runs $20 a month and gives you priority access, longer context windows and faster responses. Useful if you’re iterating heavily, not required.

Rezi sits at $29 a month or $129 a year (which works out at $10.75 a month if you commit). They have a free tier too, but it’s heavily limited — you can write content but not download it as PDF without paying, which makes it more of a trial than a usable product.

Annualised, Rezi at $29 monthly is $348 a year. ChatGPT Plus is $240 a year. Free ChatGPT is £0. The cost gap is real, but it only matters if your subscription runs longer than your job hunt.

The prompting skill gap

This is the central question of this whole article, so let me be direct.

ChatGPT only beats Rezi if you know how to constrain it. Out of the box, with a vague prompt like “write me a CV bullet for a sales role”, ChatGPT will give you something generic, slightly American, full of words like “leveraged” and “spearheaded” — exactly the AI-flavoured nonsense that gets a CV binned within ten seconds on my desk.

Rezi has solved this problem by writing the prompt for you. It asks structured questions — what’s the role, what’s the company, what did you do, what was the metric — and feeds those into a constrained prompt that says “produce one CV bullet, action verb first, metric included, under 25 words, British English”. You never see the prompt. You just see the output, which is generally clean.

To get the same output from ChatGPT, you need to write that constraint yourself. Something like: “Write one CV bullet for a [role] who [achievement]. Action verb first. Include the metric: [number]. Under 25 words. British English. No buzzwords — no ‘leveraged’, no ‘spearheaded’, no ‘results-driven’. Past tense for previous roles.”

That prompt takes you 90 seconds to write and you can reuse it forever. But you have to know to write it. And most candidates don’t.

I’ve watched candidates type “make my CV better” into ChatGPT and get back a wall of fluff, then conclude that AI is rubbish for CVs. It isn’t. Their prompt was rubbish. Same model, same output quality if the input is good.

So the real question isn’t “which tool is better?” It’s: are you willing to spend an hour learning to prompt? Because that hour will save you $348 a year and make you better at every other AI task you’ll do over the next decade. Or would you rather pay someone to skip that learning curve?

Both answers are legitimate. Just be honest about which one you’re choosing.

Where ChatGPT wins

Cost is the obvious one. Free is hard to beat. Even Plus at $20 a month undercuts Rezi by nine dollars and gives you a tool you’ll use for far more than CVs.

Flexibility is the bigger win. ChatGPT will write your cover letter, draft your LinkedIn About section, prep you for interview questions, rewrite a difficult email to a manager, and explain a job description back to you in plain English. Rezi does CVs and cover letters. That’s it.

Infinite revisions matter more than people realise. With ChatGPT you can say “make it punchier”, “British English not American”, “remove the word ‘innovative’”, “shorten by 30%” — twenty times in a row, free. Rezi has generation limits on lower tiers and the back-and-forth refinement is clunkier.

And here’s the long-term win: prompting is a learnable skill that compounds. Every hour you spend prompting ChatGPT makes you faster and better at it. Rezi is a black box — you don’t get better at using Rezi over time, because there’s nothing to get better at.

Where Rezi wins

Guardrails, mainly. Rezi physically cannot produce a CV with broken ATS formatting. The templates are locked, the structure is enforced, the section headers are parser-friendly. For a candidate who’d otherwise paste a ChatGPT response into a fancy Word template with two columns and a photo and wonder why they’re not getting interviews — Rezi removes the risk entirely.

Speed for first-timers is real too. If you upload an old CV, Rezi will produce a polished new version in about 15 minutes. ChatGPT can match that, but only if you have a prompt template ready. First-time users spend 40 minutes faffing.

The keyword targeting feature has genuine value. You paste a job description, Rezi extracts the must-have keywords, and tells you which ones are missing from your CV. You can do this in ChatGPT, but it’s a separate prompt and you have to remember to run it.

For someone who’s never used AI for CV work before and wants to skip the learning curve, Rezi is a clean, fast, low-risk path to a decent CV.

The 20-minute decision test

Here’s how to actually pick. Not me telling you, you proving it to yourself.

Open ChatGPT (free tier is fine). Set a 20-minute timer. Paste this prompt, with your details swapped in:

“You’re helping me write a CV bullet. Role: [your role]. Company type: [industry]. What I did: [one sentence]. Result: [a number — money saved, percentage improvement, time reduced, headcount, anything quantifiable]. Write one CV bullet. Rules: action verb first (not ‘responsible for’), include the metric, under 25 words, British English, past tense, no buzzwords. Show me three variations.”

Run that prompt. Read the three outputs. Pick the best one or ask for a fourth variation.

If at the end of 20 minutes you’ve produced a CV bullet you’d genuinely put on your CV — ChatGPT wins for you. You can prompt. The free tier will handle your whole job hunt. Don’t spend $29 a month.

If at the end of 20 minutes you’ve got something that still feels generic, or you couldn’t get the AI to stop using “leveraged”, or the output reads like an American intern wrote it — Rezi wins for you. The $29 buys you out of a learning curve you don’t want to climb right now. Subscribe for one month, write your CVs, cancel.

This test is more honest than any review I can write. It’s your hands on the tool, with stakes on the table — your actual CV, your actual job hunt. Twenty minutes of your time will save you either $348 a year or weeks of frustration. That’s a decent return either way.

The hidden gotcha each has

ChatGPT’s gotcha is invisible Americanisation. Even when you ask for British English, the model leans American on word choice — “resume” instead of “CV”, “color” instead of “colour”, “specialty” instead of “speciality”, “math” instead of “maths”. You have to proofread carefully and explicitly correct it. UK recruiters notice. I notice. It’s a small tell that says “AI wrote this and the candidate didn’t read it back”.

Rezi’s gotcha is template lock-in. Once your CV is built in Rezi, exporting it to a fully editable Word document is awkward. You can export to PDF easily, but if a recruiter asks for a Word version (and many UK agencies still do), you’re either paying to keep the subscription active or rebuilding it manually. Plan your export before you cancel — download the .docx, save it locally, then cancel.

Both gotchas are fixable. Both are also genuinely annoying if you’re caught out by them. Now you’re not.

Recommendation by candidate type

First job / graduate / never used AI for CVs before: Rezi for one month. Learning ChatGPT prompting and writing your first CV at the same time is too much. Pay the $29, get clean output, cancel.

Mid-career, comfortable with tech, applying to 5+ roles: ChatGPT free or Plus. The flexibility across CV, cover letter, interview prep and LinkedIn is worth far more than Rezi’s narrower focus. You’ll write better material once you build a prompt library.

Senior / executive / career changer: ChatGPT Plus. Your CV needs nuance — strategic positioning, narrative around career pivots, careful framing of seniority. Rezi’s templates are too rigid for this. You need the iterative back-and-forth ChatGPT gives you.

Bulk applier (20+ roles, need fast variations): Rezi annual at $129. The keyword-targeting feature pays for itself if you’re customising 20+ CVs to different job descriptions. ChatGPT can do it but Rezi’s faster for repeat operations.

Already paying for ChatGPT Plus: Don’t add Rezi. You’ve got everything you need; you just need a better prompt library. Spend an afternoon building one.

Final verdict

Same engine. Different wrappers. The choice is whether you want to learn to prompt or pay to skip it.

For most readers of this site — people willing to spend 15 minutes editing a draft and an hour learning a skill — ChatGPT wins. Free, flexible, learnable, compounds.

For candidates who want a clean CV in 20 minutes with zero learning curve, Rezi is a fair $29 for one month. Subscribe, build your CVs, cancel.

The wrong move is six months of Rezi at $174 because you never tried the 20-minute test. Run the test. Then choose with evidence.

Related reading:

• The full resume pillar guide covers the foundations
• ChatGPT vs Teal — the same question with a different wrapper
• Teal vs Rezi — if you’ve ruled out ChatGPT
• ChatGPT prompts for resume — the prompt library that makes free ChatGPT work
• How the ATS really works — what Rezi’s guardrails are actually protecting you from