My Wife and I Pay the Same for AI ...but Should We?

My wife opens ChatGPT maybe twice a day. Usually it’s a simple search while we are driving around, some question one of us swears we’re right about, settled in thirty seconds instead of a stalemate. Then she closes the app until the next mystery rears its head.

Meanwhile I’ve got agents running while I sleep. I burn tokens in a way that would make eco-activists cry. These tools have become a constant engine running under the hood of both my professional and personal life.

The fun part? We pay roughly the same.

I have less than $200 a month in subscriptions - she has roughly $40 a month. Yet our usage differs by orders of magnitude. Have I invented free money somehow?!

Someone else’s balance sheet

The people who’ve done the math (there’s a Hacker News thread where practitioners work it out) land on the thesis that marginal token use is most likely carrying a positive margin once the model’s trained.

But how did we get to the point where the marginal cost was manageable? Training runs, R&D, the free users, the data centers, the whole apparatus that led to this model - that’s a big fucking check to write.

OpenAI reportedly lost around $9 billion in 2025 and, by its own financial documents, isn’t projected to be cash-flow-positive until somewhere around 2030 (Fortune, November 2025). And the balance sheet absorbing all this is enormous: combined hyperscaler capex across Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle neared half a trillion dollars in 2025 (Epoch AI).

So the subsidy is real. It lives in the gap between what it costs to build and run all of this and what any of us pay to use it.

Many people are patiently doing this arithmetic. David Cahn’s “AI’s $600B Question” at Sequoia estimated the required payback, and Ed Zitron keeps hammering the sharper, angrier question “where’s the money?”. I’m standing in the room they’ve been measuring, holding my absurdly cheap miracle, and trying to milk it as much as I can before someone wakes up and charges me more.

The place where the flat price breaks

Sam Altman, back in January 2025: “we are currently losing money on openai pro subscriptions! people use it much more than we expected” (TechCrunch).

That was the $200-a-month Pro tier, not the $20 one, which is worth saying out loud, because the dollar amounts aren’t the point. The mechanism is. Flat pricing assumes you’ll be roughly average. Heavy use is exactly where a flat price stops making sense, and the company building it admits they didn’t see it coming (maybe if they had better AI…).

My wife is the dream customer. Twice a day, profitable on any plan, basically subsidizing the rest of us with her restraint.

I’m not the dream customer. Apparently, they didn’t price in my overnight fever-dream coding sessions.

Waiting for the meter

I’m loving abusing my subscriptions, but I can’t enjoy them cleanly.

I’m not concerned that everything will crash down, but I am concerned that my costs will go up …way up. I worry I’ve developed a habit I can’t afford.

I don’t know when the meter turns on, or what it’ll look like. Sam Altman has already painted a vision of AI being globally accessible and metered like electricity or running water.

But not yet… get it while it’s hot!