In a US Sample, 4.5% Paid for at Least One of Three Major Chatbots; the Top 1% Spent $903 a Month
For the first time, a16z folded US consumer payment data into its generative AI rankings. Only a small minority of consumers pay for ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, but the biggest spenders are pouring their money into automation and product building tools.
Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) published the seventh edition of its report ranking consumer generative AI services on October 5, 2026. This time, alongside web visits and mobile user counts, the firm analyzed US consumer payment data for the first time. The result is a look not just at which AI tools people turn to most, but at which ones they actually pay for.
How many people pay for AI?
In the US sample, 4.5% of consumers paid out of their own pocket for a subscription to a major AI service. That figure covers anyone who, as of August 2026, was paying for at least one of ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude. A year earlier the share was 2.1%, meaning it rose by 2.4 percentage points.
The payment data comes from a sample of US e-receipts collected by YipitData. The web ranking uses monthly visits from Similarweb, while the mobile ranking uses monthly active users from Sensor Tower, that is, the number of people who actually opened an app within a given month. The three rankings measure three different behaviors: visiting, using, and paying.
The top 1% spends $903 a month. On what?
Among paying users, the median spend was $25 a month. The top 1% of spenders, by contrast, averaged $903 a month. That average is up 80% from 18 months earlier. This group accounted for 19.5% of all observed AI spending, more than the 16.6% spent by the bottom 50% of payers combined.
Source: Google (press release)
Heavy spenders skewed toward automation, product building, and creative tools. In other words, their spending cannot be explained by chatbot subscriptions alone. Among people paying for one AI product, only 13% also paid for another AI tool, a sign that stacking multiple paid tools is still uncommon.
Do the most-used AI tools also collect the most money?
In this US sample, ChatGPT had roughly three times as many paying subscribers as Claude or Gemini. Yet 29 of the top 50 companies by consumer spending did not appear in either the web or mobile usage rankings at all. The list of services with the most users and the list of services collecting the most money look very different.
The multi-tool payment figure is not directly comparable to earlier surveys, because the products covered have changed. At the end of 2025, a16z put the share of consumers subscribing to two or more of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Cursor at 9%. This round’s 13% reflects a different product set and different criteria.
The report effectively adds a second yardstick, actual spending, next to raw AI usage. For readers choosing which paid AI to buy, usage volume and spending tell you different things. One caveat: the payment figures come from a sample of US consumers. Applying them to the Korean market would require a separate look at how much Korean users spend and what they use each tool for.