This has been discussed on here many times. Barely anyone pays for LLMs. Only companies, corporations, and a few content creators do pay. Your common folk overwhelming majority does not.
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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This site estimates 20million subscriptions, granted this is estimated from a chatgpt comment https://www.businessofapps.com/data/chatgpt-statistics/
OpenAI said ChatGPT had “tens of millions” of subscribers, which we estimate to be 20 million
I mean, should we believe them? Your source did an estimation too.
Also:
ChatGPT has 700 million active users, who access the app once a week
Where 20mil is about 3% of paid customers which is not as huge as you'd expect. And this 700mil are the ones that are only using LLM once a week. Does not account to the ones who uses it more seldom and/or are unregistered users. If we count those, paid customer % would certainly plummet.
I mean, should we believe them? Your source did an estimation too. I agree, that's why I commented the same. 3% of paid customers which is not as huge as you’d expect Not sure what the interest is around percentages, I suppose an estimate of 20million is more than a few content creators. That's nearly Australia's population
700mil is slightly over 2x USA population. And?
We can bend this logic a bit more. We have 8 billion people on this planet, and only Pakistan would be paying for a service that the rest of the world is using but not paying for.
We are talking about percentages here. 20mil is a lot. But 3% is not so much in the grand scheme of things.
Normal citizens actually pay for AI??
They are already on the enshittification path.
After the "please disregard copyright and generate all the Ghibli-style photos that you want" phase, now they enforce a 24 hour cooldown after any kind of image upload
Bregman is a treasure. Very based analysis of societal problems and actually doing shit instead of only observing.
I think it’s optimistic to think they would even care about a boycott now. By volunteering to cross the lines that Anthropic wouldn’t cross, they’ve achieved Military Industrial Complex status. It doesn’t matter if you don’t pay for a subscription, you’ll fund them with your tax dollars whether you want to or not. Their mass surveillance tools are too valuable to let them fail, so they’ll get propped up and bailed out no matter what.
That is assuming OpenAI‘s tools are actually that powerful and useful or that Altman can keep convincing the US government they are. I would say it‘s still a very fragile enterprise.
I still wouldn‘t bet against the AI market anymore. Because even though the bubble must burst eventually the US government would intervene. There is no free market, just oligarchs enriching themselves all the way to he top.
Not all GPT users are American/residing in America
Every additional customer using their product currently causes them to lose money, hand over fist.
You should still boycott them anyway though, they care about user numbers and user activity.
Well, shit.
Don't stop at chatgpt. Cancel any subscription you have! Stop using any big corporation you can!
Internet subscription canceled! See you on the other side brother
A brain ship will be the last subscription you‘ll need before leaving your mortal shell behind to enter the hive mind of the web where our souls are merged.
Or something along those lines.
Pirate the internet! Hack the planet! DDOS the universe!
I wish it was possible, Imagine mixing meshtastic with tcp/ip. it would be as slow as mid 90s, but forums/text based internet that doesn't rely on anything but communal decentralized infrastructure?
Reticulum
You can mesh together WIFI, LoRA, HaLow, the lora devices can be the same stuff you run meshtastic on. End-to-end encrypted. sourceless transmissions. You can route over i2p and classic internet for some rather reasonable privacy.
Meshcore might be a bit better suited for this, if you want to reach a forum further than 50-100km away reliably.
With the room servers it almost supports this use case already
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Don’t pay for it. But use it. A lot.
GPUs are very expensive, so if you have them generating (for free) short stories of happy little kittens riding the subway in Manhattan or whatever, you are costing them a lot of money. Just don’t give them any data.
This is such a bleak time for tech enthusiasts.
It really feels like every single major tech company is making either absolutely moronic or completely evil choices
You are just stuck choosing between different flavors of shit
It sucks even more to be a tech worker, your job is constantly threatened by automation, but you also hate working for an evil company that does not care about you, but good luck finding a non evil company that pays 6 figures
Its a major opportunity for the FOSS community. We need to step up.
Proprietary tech does completely suck though. Its all driven by capital.
Even foss is under attack. Linux (amongst other OS) are being forced to comply with integrating OS-level age verification checks, which means invading privacy and contributing to mass surveillance.
People have been arrested for developing end-to-end encryption too.
Hardware is going to move to streaming. They want your hardware in a server farm and they eventually won't let people buy hardware. That's the future.
It's coming...
The time for people to be going all out with anger was probably 2001. They basically already won and are in complete control of America in an evil way. Including the FBI and military.
I don't understand why people (myself included) are still participating in their games and culture. We are cogs in their evil machine.
It's blatantly obvious it's over already.
I should have been angrier about tech when I was 5.
Never too late. the idea that it's past time only benefits the big tech
We can stop using their services, move to open source, stay with older hardware (so that they don't get money from us) and promote the few open hardware projects
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I dropped out and plan on dropping out further, not rich but I did at least make some money out of this shit system but I am done done, I'll work but not for these pedophiles
You are just stuck choosing between different flavors of shit
Or self-hosting your shit. Or at least find a friend who does...
True, but getting more expensive to do so by the day because of these AI companies.
Fair point, no argument here! Can't wait for it all to implode, I've got a shopping list ready for when it does :)
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People actually pay for ChatGPT? I am completely out of the loop lol. Maybe thats a good thing.
I’m a software developer for a small company with the two owners being the engineers and they have a Copilot subscription. It saves you countless man hours.
Looking up documentation is very rare now as it’s consumed that much data. It’s not perfect but it’s not we are vibe coding either it’s more like intellisense n steroids. We have lots of practices for how we do things and it learns from that context.
I wouldn’t pay for it for personal use but business use it’s actually great for us.
I'm a senior full stack software dev for over 20 years and I still search and use stack overflow links the same way as always. fuck your copilot licenses. they are not necessary and any productivity gains they bring are more than negated by the social and environmental impact from data centers and AI fueled job losses.
Spoiler: All Americans that pay taxes are bankrolling authoritarianism. People who buy items from America are bankrolling authoritarianism.
Are all you Americans going to stop paying taxes?
I did
They haven't used their 2nd amendment yet, so I doubt it.
And keep in mind that Anthropic is just as pro-war and morally bankrupt as OpenAI; the only difference is they didn't donate as much to the Trump coffers.
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I did my part this morning because fuck Sam Altman
All US big tech feudal lords are helping the Fascist US regime. Even Antrophic. Boycott them all..
Cancelled 2 days ago. Feel terrible for not doing it sooner.
Just out of curiosity: what value did you get from a subscription that made it worth it before?
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LOL, oh cuz that went so well for Twitter? Fuck ai
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