TikTok owner ByteDance launches paid tier for China’s most popular AI chatbot

BEIJING, June 24 — Chinese tech giant and TikTok creator ByteDance introduced paid subscriptions for the country’s most popular AI chatbot today, as it seeks to monetise its enormous user base.

Doubao has grown to more than 300 million monthly active users since launching in 2023.

It is the first major domestic AI chatbot to introduce a paid subscription service, with rivals including DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen and Tencent’s Yuanbao all remaining free.

“Doubao’s professional version will offer higher usage quotas,” ByteDance said in a social media post announcing the subscription service.

Paid users of the app will be able to perform practical, real-life tasks including organising local files, developing websites and generating PowerPoint slides within the app.

Free users will be able to use basic search functions, but face limits in video and image generation.

The move reflects ByteDance’s “need to balance cost and scale”, Li Chengdong, founder of Beijing-based tech consultancy Dolphin, told AFP.

“Doubao’s average daily token usage has increased more than a thousandfold compared with its launch, and computing power costs rise exponentially with user scale,” he said.

While paid subscriptions are commonplace among leading Western AI chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, the Chinese market is dominated by free models due to stiff domestic competition, analysts say.

“The competition among domestic AI players is heated and users have yet to get used to paying for services,” Zhang Yi, founder of research firm iiMedia, told AFP.

“Everyone is focusing on getting more users, so the monetisation of AI products is much slower than that in overseas markets.”

The rollout of paid subscription plans comes as ByteDance aims to expand its artificial intelligence footprint by investing heavily in the industry.

“Over the past few years, we have been concentrating on narrowing the scope of our business and focusing on our AI venture,” ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo said in a video at a tech gathering yesterday. — AFP