Big Tech wants you to pay $20/month for AI. Here's why that's a problem — and what I built instead.
OpenAI charges $20/month for ChatGPT Plus. Google charges $20/month for Gemini Advanced. Microsoft charges $30/month for Copilot.
Notice a pattern?
They all landed on roughly the same price. Not because that's what AI costs to run. Because that's what the market will bear from a Fortune 500 perspective.
The Real Cost of AI
Here's what they don't tell you: the marginal cost of serving one AI query is fractions of a cent.
Anthropics's API pricing for Claude Haiku is $0.00025 per 1K input tokens. A typical conversation uses maybe 2,000 tokens. That's $0.0005 per conversation — half a thousandth of a dollar.
At $20/month, you'd need to have 40,000 conversations to justify the cost from a pure compute standpoint.
So who's getting rich? Hint: it's not you.
The Access Problem
Here's what bothers me most: $20/month is a lot of money in most of the world.
- In Nigeria, that's roughly 1.5% of the average monthly salary
- In India, it's about 2% of median income
- In the Philippines, it's nearly 3%
Big Tech priced AI for Silicon Valley salaries. The rest of the world got left out.
And even in wealthy countries — students, freelancers, people between jobs — $20/month adds up fast when you're also paying for Netflix, Spotify, cloud storage, and a dozen other subscriptions.
What I Did Instead
I built SimplyLouie — an AI assistant that costs ✌️2/month.
Not $2 as a temporary promo. Not $2 for a watered-down version. Two dollars per month for real AI capability, powered by Claude.
How? By building lean. No office in San Francisco. No enterprise sales team. No investor pressure to inflate prices.
Just the actual cost of the API, a small margin to keep the lights on, and 50% of revenue going to animal rescue.
The Uncomfortable Math
At $2/month, I need 25 paying users to match what one $50/month user gives a big competitor.
But here's the thing: there are way more people who can afford $2 than $20.
And they deserve AI too.
The Real Question
Why did Big Tech settle on $20?
Because they're not trying to democratize AI. They're trying to build another subscription revenue stream on top of existing monopolies.
Google already has your search data. Microsoft already has your Office. OpenAI is trying to become your everything app.
$20/month isn't a price. It's a moat.
SimplyLouie is ✌️2/month. Real AI, real price. Try it free.
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