Who Pays for AI in America, and How Much

Venture firm Andreessen Horowitz looked at how much Americans actually pay for AI chatbots. The numbers turned out to be wildly uneven. Almost half of adult Americans use some kind of AI tool. But only 4.5 percent of those surveyed paid for a chatbot subscription in August. That means ChatGPT (OpenAI's chatbot), Gemini (Google's chatbot), and Claude (Anthropic's chatbot). The top one percent of paying users spends about $900 a month on average. That is 79 percent more than at the start of 2025. A typical paying user spends about $25 a month. That level has stayed stable for a long time now.

The report found that the money from top spenders mostly goes to automation tools, not chat subscriptions themselves. These tools include n8n, Manus, and fal, programs that carry out multi-step tasks on their own. The rest goes to creative services like Higgsfield and HeyGen. Plain chat with a model costs very little on its own. An agent that sees a work task through to the end costs a company hundreds of dollars a month.