A16z: Top 1% of Consumer AI Payers Average $903/Month

Andreessen Horowitz research shows the top 1% of paying US consumer AI users now average $903 per month, up from $504 in January 2025, and account for 19.5% of all consumer AI spending, more than the bottom 50% of users combined. The median consumer AI spend has barely moved, remaining around $25 per month. One top-1% payer spends as much as roughly 59 bottom-half payers on average. Model labs are better positioned than API-dependent app developers to profit from these heavy users, because labs pay only serving costs while apps pay API prices. Anthropic said one $200/month Max subscriber ran up tens of thousands of dollars in usage, a cost no API-paying app could absorb. Apps targeting heavy users may need to own more of the model stack, as Cursor did with its Composer coding model. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, speaking separately on the same dynamics, said some Perplexity Computer users spend upwards of $10,000 a month running agent loops, and that certain engineers at Meta and other companies generate around $10 million a year per engineer in AI coding tool costs.