Chloe Wang, a 26-year-old fund employee in Shenzhen, said she “definitely wouldn’t” pay for a subscription to Doubao, Chinese tech giant ByteDance’s artificial intelligence chatbot, at its proposed price.
“I’m willing to pay for AI tools, but I don’t think it’s worth that much – even though I find Doubao relatively easy to use among domestic AI products,” said Wang, who uses the app occasionally for work-related queries.
“If I had to pay for an AI tool as a productivity aid, I’d probably rather subscribe to ChatGPT,” she added, referring to US firm OpenAI’s chatbot.
Wang’s hesitation highlights the challenges ByteDance may face as it moves to offer paid subscription plans on Doubao amid soaring computing costs. The South China Morning Post spoke to 12 AI users in mainland China, and found that 10 were reluctant to pay, citing high prices and relatively weak performance in work-related tasks.
Zhang Zonggai, a marketing professional in Guangzhou, was one of only two respondents willing to consider paying. He said, however, that it depended on how good the paid features were.
“The only question is whether it’s necessary to choose a general-purpose app like Doubao, or a specialised AI tool” that could satisfy particular needs, he said. Zhang used Doubao to search for information, translate, edit photos and even help grade his child’s homework, but said its reliability for professional tasks was “rather ordinary”.
According to Doubao’s updated iOS App Store page, a standard plan was available for 68 yuan (US$9.96/RM39.04) per month or 688 yuan (RM393.58) per year. An “enhanced” plan cost 200 yuan (RM115.19) per month and 2,048 yuan (RM1,179.57) per year, while a top “professional” version was priced at 500 yuan (RM287.98) per month and 5,088 yuan (RM2,930.49) per year.
The company has not disclosed the official launch date of these subscription plans and did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This marked a big step forward for a paid subscription plan by a major Chinese AI chatbot, with “significant implications for the entire AI chatbot market in China”, Nomura analysts said in a research note on Monday.
Doubao, with 345 million monthly active users in March, has been China’s top AI app since last October, maintaining a lead over Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen app and DeepSeek, which ranked second and third with 166 million and 127 million monthly active users, respectively, in March, according to QuestMobile. Alibaba is the owner of the South China Morning Post.
Analysts attributed ByteDance’s decision to surging token consumption and rising infrastructure costs.
Alvin Wang Graylin, honorary senior fellow on technology at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, described Doubao’s move as a “predictable consequence of token economics catching up with the company that has the most users” to serve.
“The compute bill has to be paid somehow, and 345 million monthly active users at zero [average revenue per user] is not a sustainable equation, even for a company with TikTok’s cash flow,” Graylin said, referring to ByteDance’s massively popular short-video app.
ByteDance said last month that Doubao processed some 120 trillion tokens a day in March, doubling from about 60 trillion a day in December and jumping a thousand-fold from 120 billion a day in May last year.
That meant “maintaining flat free access for heavy workloads” was economically unsustainable and Doubao’s tiered subscription plans “effectively asked heavy users to subsidise their own compute”, Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note on Monday.
Poe Zhao, China tech analyst and founder of the Hello China Tech newsletter, said: “The marginal value of adding one more free user is shrinking, but the cost of serving them is not. This is less a strategic choice than a structural necessity.”
The Chinese consumer market, however, remained “a paid-subscription graveyard” for general-purpose chatbots, Graylin said, pointing to internet search giant Baidu’s plans last year to charge users for its Ernie Bot before later making it free amid intensifying competition.
While US AI chatbots saw a paying ratio of 5 per cent in 2025, with about 50 million subscribers out of 1 billion monthly active users, Morgan Stanley expected a “significantly lower” ratio for Chinese services, between 0.3 and 3 per cent.
Doubao’s annualised subscription revenue could thus range from US$101mil (RM395mil) to US$1.5bil (RM5.88bil) – which was “still modest” compared with ByteDance’s core advertising business, according to the investment bank.
“Chinese consumers tend towards what I’d call emergency subscriptions. They pay for one month when a specific project demands it, then cancel,” Zhao said. “Renewal rates for Chinese tool products run at roughly half the level of what comparable overseas products sustain.”
Still, Doubao’s experiment was meant to test whether “high-compute professional features” could carry a premium when general chat could not, Graylin said.
While ByteDance’s move would “likely prevent the entire chatbot sector from deepening losses”, it was not yet clear whether Doubao’s domestic rivals would immediately follow suit, Nomura analysts said.
Competitors including Alibaba, DeepSeek and Tencent Holdings would likely “adopt a wait-and-see approach” before implementing similar strategies, Nomura analysts Jialong Shi and Rachel Guo said.
“We believe it is only a matter of time before the entire market transitions to subscription-based models, as operating costs for AI chatbots rise rapidly alongside expanding user bases,” they said.
Alibaba, DeepSeek and Tencent did not immediately respond to a request for comment. – South China Morning Post
