Many people use it, and few pay
The Decoder on October 10 relayed Andreessen Horowitz's ranking of consumer AI products. a16z says nearly half of US consumers use AI, but only about a quarter do so daily. In August, 4.5 percent had an active paid personal subscription to ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, roughly double the share a year earlier.
ChatGPT accounts for most of the new paying users. Those percentages are a16z's figures.
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In the panel, spending sits in the top 1 percent
This edition uses YipitData's US consumer-card panel to see what people actually paid. The Decoder says the figures come from panels and do not represent total revenue. Gemini is absent from the spending ranking because its revenue cannot be separated from Google's other subscriptions.
In that panel, the top 1 percent of spenders account for nearly a fifth of observed AI spending, more than the entire bottom half combined. That top 1 percent averages about $900 a month and now spends 79 percent more than in early 2025. The typical paying user spends about $25 a month, and that level has held steady for a while.
[1]These figures are not industry revenue
The $900 and $25 are average monthly spending inside the panel. They are not a published price per customer, and they are not global revenue. The ranking also says the heaviest spenders buy building and design tools more often. That is a16z's description of the group.
OpenAI reported an annualized revenue run rate of $1 billion from ChatGPT advertising in August. That is one advertising line, not the same measure as the personal-subscription panel.
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