Subscription plans are still the primary way consumers and small businesses pay for AI. These plans are highly subsidized—as we previously explained in June—but can still make economic sense as powerful customer acquisition and marketing tools. For example, the goodwill engendered by OpenAI’s generous resets is partially responsible for the recent surge in Codex adoption and has forced Anthropic to repeatedly walk back planned subscription nerfs to avoid getting clobbered in the court of public opinion.

Furthermore, because subscription plans are so heavily subsidized, they can also have a large impact on margins and revenue per MW despite only being a small portion of total revenue. Consider the following rough numbers for Anthropic.

Despite being just 10% of overall revenue, subscriptions can take up over 40% of inference compute and lower blended revenue per MW by ~$36M. Subscriptions are even more important for OpenAI, as they make up a larger portion of their total revenue. For specific numbers, see our Tokenomics Model.