Teardown: AI is at most a tenth of a 99-yuan AI toy's cost
TMTPost tore down a 99-yuan AI toy cat and estimated that of the roughly 90 yuan it costs above a 9.9-yuan free-shipping plush toy, about 70 yuan goes to hardware upgrades such as the chip, module, battery and speaker, while cloud AI costs about 10 yuan as a bought-out license or one to two yuan on a per-call basis — 1% to 10% of the price. The article cites Taobao data showing AI toy sales up more than 1,600% in 2025 and a 500-fold year-on-year jump for the category during the 2026 Tmall New Year sale, and cites MIIT figures putting China's AI toy market at about 29 billion yuan in 2025 and a projected 34.2 billion yuan in 2026. It also reports return rates of roughly 30% to 40% for AI plush toys on e-commerce platforms, up to 80% in livestream channels, and that 7 of 15 AI toys in a comparative test by consumer associations in Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi fell below the 75% pass line for voice-interaction success.
The teardown puts concrete numbers on how little of an AI toy's price goes to model calls, arguing that the savings from very cheap Chinese model APIs have not been spent on better memory, content or service.
把一只99元的AI猫拆开，里面有一团棉花、一块指甲盖大小的电路板、一颗不到7块钱的芯片、一段别人写好的代码，乍一看确实不像个特别“智能”的产品。那么，从9.9元包邮的毛绒玩具，到99元的AI玩具，多出来的那90块钱，花在了哪里？
这其中，大约70块花在硬件升级上。芯片、模组、电池、喇叭，让一只玩偶从“不会说话”变成“能联网说话”。还有一部分花在云端的AI上，买断一份授权约10块钱，如果按次调用，只值一两块。剩下的，交给渠道、佣金、退货损耗和营销。
也就是说，孩子抱了一晚上的那个“智能”功能，在成本表里排到了最后，占的钱最多只有一成，少的时候，几毛钱。
#Espressif Systems#Baidu AI Cloud#iFlytek Spark#Doubao#DeepSeek#FoloToy#Haivivi#BubblePal#Fibocom