AI subscription statistics: 55% say they pay, BofA sees 3%

Key AI subscription statistics: 55% of AI users say they pay, and the median household spends $20

Most paid plans sit near one of two prices. Six of the 19 cost $14.99 to $20, and eight cost $99.99 to $200. OpenAI added the only rung above that, at $500, at its DevDay event on 29 September 2026. Google sells the cheapest paid plan of all, at $4.99. All of these are US list prices before tax.

How many people pay for AI?

Most American AI users now say they pay for something. Menlo Ventures' 2026 State of Consumer AI found that 55% of US AI users report paying for at least one AI product, from a survey of 5,067 adults it ran with Morning Consult in July 2026. Menlo says that's equivalent to roughly 90 million Americans. Not all of them pay their own bill, though. Only 48% of payers cover the whole cost themselves, while 34% have a family member or friend paying and about 20% have an employer or school paying.

Card data tells a smaller story. The Bank of America Institute found that about 3% of its households paid for AI services in 2026, based on card and ACH payments to merchants it identifies as AI services. That share is climbing. In February 2026, the number of paying households was 38% above the 2024 average.

The two figures count different things. Menlo asks AI users, a group that's 64% of US adults, and it counts plans that someone else pays for. Bank of America counts every household it banks, and only payments it can match to an AI merchant. A plan billed through Apple's or Google's app store, or bundled into a Microsoft 365 bill, may never show up there as AI spending.

OpenAI's own figures sit in between. On 27 February 2026, OpenAI said it had more than 50 million consumer subscribers and more than 900 million weekly active users. That's about 1 in 18 weekly users paying, or 5.6%. OpenAI also reported more than 9 million paying business users. At DevDay on 29 September it cited 1.2 billion weekly users. It didn't give a new subscriber count.

For scale, Pew Research Center found that 49% of US adults used an AI chatbot when it surveyed 5,119 people in February 2026, up from a third in 2024. The full set of OpenAI numbers is in ChatGPT statistics.

How much do people spend on AI subscriptions each month?

The typical US household that pays for AI spends about $20 a month on it. Bank of America's card data put the median paying household at $20 in February 2026, which is 10.4% more than a year earlier. Menlo Ventures puts the typical payer a little higher, at $20 to $49 a month.

The spread is wide. About 60% of paying Bank of America households spend $20 or less, and 7% spend more than $100. The growth is in the band just above $20: the share paying $21 to $40 has grown 50% since 2024. Menlo found that 46% of payers spend more than they did a year ago. Only 12% spend less.

A small group carries the market. In Menlo's data, the 14% of payers who spend $100 or more a month account for 60% of consumer AI spending. People whose employer or school pays spend $95 a month on average. People paying entirely out of pocket spend $55.

Surveys of paying subscribers come out higher. Bango, a subscription billing company, said in November 2025 that the average US AI subscriber pays almost $66 a month across 4 tools, and that 24% pay over $100. Bango didn't publish its sample size, so treat it as a vendor survey. In Australia, Westpac said its paying customers spent about A$37 a month each on AI as of March 2026.

What does every major AI subscription cost in October 2026?

Paid consumer chatbot plans cost from $4.99 to $500 a month as of October 2026. We checked each vendor's own pricing or help page on 6 October, and we found 19 paid tiers that have a public US price. Four of the seven vendors (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Perplexity) put their main plan at $19.99 or $20.

That means the cheapest tier and the dearest one are 100 times apart. If you stack the standard plans of the big three, which are ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro and Google AI Pro, you pay $59.99 a month. That's $719.88 over a year, and it's three times what the median paying household spends. If you stack their top tiers instead, the bill comes to $899.99 a month.

Nine of the 19 tiers cost $99.99 or more. That's a lot of shelf space for a group Menlo puts at 14% of payers. Menlo's report explains the design: AI companies use "the subscription to price the access and the meter to price the excess." Half of payers are on flat monthly plans and 26% hold annual ones, per Menlo. Another 15% mix a plan with usage charges.

We left three plans out. xAI lists SuperGrok Lite and SuperGrok Heavy on its pricing page but shows no price for either unless you sign in. Microsoft 365 Family ($12.99) gives Copilot to the plan owner only. OpenAI's pricing page shows local prices by country (from Canada it showed CA$25 for Plus), so the ChatGPT figures come from the OpenAI Help Center.

If you want to total up your own stack, there's an AI subscription cost calculator for that. The plans that cost under $10 are compared feature by feature in cheap AI tiers compared. The $100 and $200 Claude plans are in Claude Pro vs Claude Max, and the API prices per token are in LLM API pricing statistics.

Consumer AI spending tripled to $40 billion in 2026

Consumers will spend about $40 billion on AI in 2026, which is more than three times the $12 billion they spent in 2025, according to an estimate by Menlo Ventures. The number of users grew far more slowly than that. Menlo counts 2 billion people who use AI around the world in 2026, up 11% from 1.8 billion.

You can see the same climb in the app stores. Sensor Tower expected AI apps to pass $4 billion of in-app purchase revenue in the first half of 2026, which would be 36% more than in the second half of 2025. Most of that goes to one app. Appfigures put what people spent on ChatGPT in April 2026 at $301 million across the App Store and Google Play. All of Gemini, Claude, Grok, Copilot and Perplexity together made $138 million.

The rivals are closing in, though. In April, Appfigures put Claude at $76 million, Grok at $39 million, and both Perplexity and Gemini at about $11 million each. In January 2025, ChatGPT earned 18.5 times as much as all of the others put together. By April 2026 it was only a little over 2 times as much. Even so, ChatGPT made an estimated $1.3 billion from January to April 2026, which was up 121% on the year before. How many people use each app is a different question, and it's covered in AI chatbot market share.

Analysts at Bank of America expect it to keep going. In March 2026, BofA Global Research said that the US market for consumer AI could grow to $75 billion a year.

Who pays for AI subscriptions, and who covers the bill?

The people who pay are the ones who use it every day. Menlo found that half of all payers use AI daily, against 26% of the people who don't pay. In Menlo's view, how much someone uses AI matters more than what they earn, though use still goes up with income.

Bank of America sees a tilt toward households that are young or well off. In its data, the households that earn over $125,000 are the most likely to pay for AI. Gen Z and younger Millennial households are also more likely to pay than older Millennials and Gen X. But the median spend grew the fastest among households that earn $75,000 to $125,000.

Outside the US the curves are steeper. Westpac said in May 2026 that more than 150,000 of its Australian retail customers pay for at least one AI subscription each month, up 1,284% from 11,000 three years earlier. In South Korea, KB Kookmin Card said in February 2026 that customers paying for generative AI with its cards rose 413% over two years, per Asia Economy. Why people stop paying is covered in why people cancel AI subscriptions.

Where these AI subscription numbers come from

Whizi Research opened every figure on this page at its primary source on 6 October 2026. Those are company posts and help centers, the Menlo Ventures and Bank of America Institute reports, Sensor Tower's and Appfigures' own pages, and Pew Research Center. Plan prices are US monthly list prices before tax, read from US pages where a vendor shows local prices. The 100x spread, the $59.99 stack and the 5.6% OpenAI ratio are our own arithmetic on those figures. We don't compare Menlo's 2026 survey with its 2025 report, because Menlo says the 2025 figure was a worldwide estimate, not a survey of US users.

We dropped what we couldn't trace. That includes a widely repeated claim that AI apps earned over $5 billion in 2025, and an average professional spend of $110 to $150 a month. We found both only in roundups. Where two sources disagree, as Menlo and Bank of America do on who pays, both appear here with their method and date.

Can I quote these AI subscription statistics?

Yes. Every figure here is free to use with a link back to this page, and a plain credit line works:

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Source: Whizi Research, "AI subscription statistics: 55% say they pay, BofA sees 3%", whizi.io/resources/ai-subscription-statistics, updated October 2026.

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We recheck the price table when a vendor changes its plans. The same sourcing rules apply on our AI hallucination statistics page.