After more than a year of relying almost exclusively on Doubao, Li Si is weighing whether to abandon China’s most popular AI chatbot.

In recent weeks, the 20-year-old college student says the chatbot has become noticeably less reliable. “Now it forgets everything within 10 minutes. Data processing has become painfully slow, too.”

Her frustration echoes a growing wave of user discontent that has spread online as Doubao’s owner, ByteDance, who also owns TikTok, rolls out subscription plans for the chatbot ranging from 688 yuan to 5,088 yuan ($97 to $713) a year. The premium tiers are expected to become available later this month.

The pricing places Doubao alongside premium plans from rivals such as Kimi, ChatGPT, and Google Gemini, fueling heated debate across Chinese social media. Supporters say paid tiers could deliver faster reasoning and more advanced models, while critics question whether the new offerings are simply repackaged versions of features that were previously free.

A related topic on microblogging platform Weibo drew 370 million views and 147,000 discussions. Among the most-liked comments were: “I will uninstall it for good” and “If it can provide exceptional value, charging is understandable.”

For Li, however, the subscription fee itself is not the main concern. “If it charges, I’ll just find another one,” she said. “What worries me more is the time and effort it takes to get used to a new tool.”

ByteDance did not respond to Sixth Tone’s interview request, instead referring to a June 3 statement posted on WeChat.

In the statement, the company pledged to keep core functions — including search, writing, image generation, and voice and video chat — free for all users. It also said a new Pro tier, still in testing, would target professionals with tools for data analysis, software development, financial analysis, and scientific research.

Despite the backlash, Doubao remains China’s dominant AI assistant, with 345 million monthly active users and more than 140 million daily active users as of March. Market research firm QuestMobile data showed users opened the app an average of 54.8 times a month in the first quarter, well ahead of rival DeepSeek’s 41.7. Yet, the app generates less than 1 million yuan in daily revenue, largely from e-commerce commissions, underscoring its limited ability to monetize a massive user base.

Price point

Wan Siyan, a former intern at a Chinese tech company, worries that if China’s most popular AI assistant succeeds in convincing users to pay, the rest of the industry may not be far behind.

For now, Beijing-based Moonshot AI has introduced paid tiers for its Kimi chatbot, while DeepSeek, Tencent, and Alibaba have yet to launch comparable consumer subscription services.

That is why Wan believes Doubao’s timing is premature. While the chatbot is positioned for the mass market, she argued that it has yet to deliver the level of performance users would expect from a paid service. “It’s gotten a bit overconfident and lost sight of what its users actually need,” she said.

Yet industry observer Zhang Shule sees the shift as inevitable. As computing costs continue to rise, he said, AI companies will increasingly adopt the same “free basics, paid premium” model that has long existed across China’s internet sector.

“The era of a free lunch is coming to an end,” he said.

Qi Tao, an associate professor of philosophy at Shanghai’s Fudan University, believes the debate extends beyond business models. If the most powerful AI tools increasingly move behind paywalls, he argued, existing inequalities could widen.

“For wealthier users, AI could become a springboard to more creative and higher-value work,” Qi said. “Those with lower incomes and less education, meanwhile, risk being reduced to little more than movers of data and information.”

Young Chinese users, however, often take a more pragmatic view. He Xin, a college student in Shanghai, said she understands why AI companies are introducing paid tiers, even if she has no plans to subscribe to Doubao herself. The free version covers most of her needs, while she turns to ChatGPT for more advanced writing tasks.

Drawing on a previous internship at ByteDance, He doubts companies would deliberately make their free products worse. “It would be like shooting themselves in the foot,” she said. Instead, she expects AI firms to reserve their most advanced capabilities for paying users while continuing to offer functional free versions.

(Header image: VCG)