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Kirby Plessas doesn't have an AI subscription. She has two.

As a self-described technophile, she uses chatbots outside of work to plan family parties, tweak cocktail recipes and once to diagnose a broken wine cooler's motherboard. All the help Plessas gets from AI justifies the $40 a month she pays for both OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.

"I wouldn't doubt that within a year I'll probably have a Claude subscription as well," she said.

But for most people, she believes, free AI is good enough. And judging by their spending, Americans agree.

Only about 3% of households were paying for AI in February, using the most recent numbers available from the Bank of America Institute, which researches consumer trends based on the bank's customer transactions.

Yet while the number of personal subscribers remains small — plenty of workplaces and universities do pay for AI services — their ranks are growing fast. About 10% more households paid up in February compared to a year earlier, according to the institute.

"If you think back to Netflix and streaming services, at the beginning the growth was quite slow," said Sekoul Krastev, cofounder of the Decision Lab, a research firm with an emphasis on behavioral science. Krasteve said it isn't the norm to pay for AI — yet.

"Once that status quo is created, subscriptions will definitely start to go up sharply just the way we saw with streaming services," he said.

Plessas puts it this way: "There's a thought out there that we're all going to get addicted to using AI. So when the free ones go away, everyone will have to pay."

Subscriptions get you more 

Even if they worry about how it will affect their daily lives, most Americans use AI. In fact, 51% of Americans said they use AI to research what they're curious about, according to a Quinnipiac poll released in March.

They're just using free versions. Most AI platforms offer them — to a point. For example, OpenAI lets users send its default model 10 messages every five hours before booting them to a weaker version.

"You would get a little notification that says 'Your time has run out,'" said Pam Dean, who now subscribes to both ChatGPT and Claude. "You're stuck in the middle of something and then you couldn't continue."

The main selling point for subscribers is that they get to ask smarter models more questions, more often. A $20 monthly ChatGPT Plus subscription lets users send up to 1,280 messages a day before a downgrade.

Subscribers also get more advanced features, such as being able to create tailored versions of ChatGPT to fit their specific needs.

To prepare for a possible move from Los Angeles to Mexico, Jim Arnold created "Francisco," a ChatGPT version that acts as his Spanish tutor. Francisco corrects Arnold's Spanish and has conversations with him through his computer speakers. Arnold fine-tuned Francisco to speak slower, and to take longer pauses before replying. That gives Arnold a chance to think of the right Spanish word before Francisco interrupts.

Still, Arnold never tried the free version of ChatGPT, and was wondering if paying was worthwhile. So he asked the AI. "And of course, you know, ChatGPT's answer was that I should keep what I'm doing for sure," Arnold said.

Today's version of ChatGPT will remain free …

OpenAI has about 50 million subscribers. Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT at OpenAI, believes there's room to quadruple the number of users who pay.

Still, Turley said, subscribers will always be a minority of the people who use ChatGPT. He said the company's mission is to keep this tech accessible to benefit everyone: "And one of the ways that we do that is by making sure people can access it for free."

The birth of ChatGPT subscriptions wasn't about revenue, but keeping the site usable, Turley said. AI takes expensive computing power, and in the early days after ChatGPT's launch, putting up a subscription paywall helped the company keep up with demand while still allowing deeper access to those willing to pay up.

"We weren't even trying to make money," Turley said about the launch of the subscriptions. But, he added, "It's been a really nice side effect that that also generates revenue and builds an amazing business."

…but you might have to pay for the next version

Turley believes OpenAI will likely always offer a free version of ChatGPT. But he is not promising a free version of its eventual successor.

That will likely be an agentic AI, a type of AI that can act on its own to do tasks for the user or an organization. Think of an AI agent that can plan a vacation for you, or do your shopping.

OpenAI already offers agentic services, but Turley envisions a version that acts like a personal assistant, thinking of ways to improve your life while you're away from the screen. And that assistant could be so advanced and expensive to run that it might need to stay behind the paywall.

"If we do our job right, many people are going to want to pay and subscribe," Turley said.

Could AI companies use advertisements? 

AI companies do have an alternative option to cover the cost of their services — advertisements. That's how many of the biggest websites, like Facebook, have kept their services free for years.

But Jeff Hancock, head of Stanford University's Tech and Impact Policy Center, said there's a reason AI companies should be cautious about adopting an ad model: "People hate it."

Ads incentivize social media companies to make sure users keep scrolling. The more screen time, the more ads get viewed. And endless scrolling has caused concerns about people's mental health and attention spans.

"People just don't like how social media fits into our lives now," Hancock said.

The second reason to be careful about adopting ads, he said, is that AI is a different kind of tech from social media platforms. The kind of AI personal assistant that Turley described would ideally work in the background, so the user would actually spend less time looking at the screen — a poor match for a business model where the main revenue comes from seeing ads.

"AI platforms have the potential to create a completely different economic model by the incentive being: Is this useful for you?" Hancock said.

Sarah Womer subscribes to several AI platforms. In fact, she rotates subscriptions across different AI, saying they each have their own benefits and personalities. "You're not limited to one flavor of AI, just like you're not limited to one flavor of ice cream," Womer said.

She prefers using OpenAI when she books vacations. But Open AI has been piloting ads for free users and Go tier subscribers, and Womer worries AI companies could skew models to favor their advertisers.

In a statement from OpenAI when the ad test was launched in February, the company promised that ads would be clearly labeled and that they would not influence ChatGPT's answers. Users would be matched with ads, the statement said, based on "the topic of your conversation, your past chats, and past interactions with ads." But promises like that haven't put Womer at ease. So when she uses AI to research products she wants to try — like the best red light face mask — she instead uses her subscription to Kagi, an AI and search engine platform that boasts about its privacy standards and lack of ads.

AI could be paid for through bundling 

ChatGPT launched less than four years ago, and the revenue model for AI services is still very much in flux.

The global investment advisor company BlackRock held a summit in March about upgrading the country's infrastructure, where OpenAI CEO Sam Altman floated the idea that AI services could be sold like electricity – essentially billing customers based on how much they use.

Greg Portell, lead partner at the Kearney consulting firm, believes another potential option is for companies to bundle AI in with other subscriptions — like Amazon Prime or internet service.

He thinks this is likely since Americans are already fatigued by subscriptions. Rather than get consumers to sign up for another monthly expense, it would be easier to just add it to one they're already paying for.

"Every consumer says they have too many subscriptions, but yet every subscription provider is looking at how they can bundle things," Portell said.

Of course, many Americans already use a paid version of AI at work. Those corporate accounts often come with limits on personal use, but Portell wonders if in the future workplaces will lift those limits. Maybe having your job pay for your personal access to Claude or Gemini is the new employee perk.

Google is a financial supporter of NPR.