Paying for AI subscriptions is more popular than you think

Generative AI services and chatbots are everywhere nowadays, but to get access to all their features, you’ll need to pay up. These premium offerings usually give power users a little more leeway or feature richness, additional tokens, or more powerful models for faster processing speeds or more advanced tasks. I don’t subscribe to any AI services; I’d much rather use their free iterations where possible. But the question is, do you?

Well, we asked just this in a recent poll to gauge just how popular paying for AI services is in our community. The results are now in, and you can view the data below.

This poll received over 2,000 votes, and there’s a clear winner on the surface. Just over two in five respondents (43%) do not pay for any AI services, which represents a single-answer majority. However, a third of readers (33%) admit that they do. These two options represent the lion’s share of the readers who voted, but they tell only part of a larger story. What is interesting is highlighting just how many readers subscribe to either one or two AI services. Combined, they represent 48% of the respondents on this poll, outweighing the 43% who don’t pay for any.

Notably, many who do pay for subscriptions get AI features indirectly. This should certainly be acknowledged when looking at this data. As reader shie896 writes, “I get Gemini Plus as part of my Google One subscription, and it serves me well.”

What about the outliers? Well, 6% of respondents pay for three, 1% pay for four, and a sliver more pay for five or more. In summary, fewer than 10% of respondents pay for 3 or more AI subscriptions, yet it’s surprising that two subscriptions aren’t enough for some.

As my colleague Bryan Wolfe describes in the article in which the poll is embedded, it’s a good idea to have a look at which AI services you truly need to pay for — you might save an awful lot of money with a simple audit.

Do you pay for any AI services? If you do, which? And why? Let us know in the comments below.