In a bid to monetise its artificial intelligence chatbot, ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is rolling out paid subscriptions for Doubao. A strategy by Chinese tech giant ByteDance to monetise its artificial intelligence chatbot Doubao, as costs and usage continue to rise.
China’s most popular AI application, Doubao, is trialling a tiered pricing structure with people paying 68 yuan ($13), 200 yuan or 500 yuan for premium features. The following are alleged to focus on complex tasks that include making slides, analysing data and creating videos.
The chatbot will continue to have a free version, a Doubao spokesperson said, with the plans for paid subscriptions still in the testing phase. The company hasn’t announced any timelines for the launch of the fee-based services.
With this new “freemium” approach to Doubao, which would give both free and paid tiers, the app would mark a departure from the current largely free-to-use chatbot market in China. Any loss in their profit margins is something that the tech firms have been ready to bear if it leads to more market share for them. They would be prepared to pay for it, too.
In March 2026, Doubao’s monthly active users totalled 345 million. That’s nearly double the number of “Qwen” and “DeepSeek” chatbots from Alibaba and DeepSeek, respectively, China’s second and third-most popular AI apps by monthly active users (MAUs) with 166 million and 127 million, respectively, according to consultancy QuestMobile.
The use of Doubao has increased significantly in the past few months, as has the computing power used.
To draw more users to their platforms, China’s tech companies like ByteDance went on a marketing campaign during the Chinese New Year, with Doubao being particularly prominent on the Spring Festival Gala, the country’s most popular television show.
Doubao’s monthly active users grew by some 100 million in the first quarter of 2026, QuestMobile data showed.
Meanwhile, Doubao’s daily token consumption increased by 100% in the last three months, reflecting a surge in the number of users leveraging AI agents and engaging in compute-intensive activities like video creation, ByteDance said.
Part of why ByteDance is charging for Doubao may be because of increased costs due to increased usage.
“As the number of users increases, the computing power required also increases, so does the number of requests,” Mr Zhang Yi, chief executive of consultancy firm iiMedia Research Group in Guangzhou, said.
As costs skyrocket, ByteDance would have had to consider how to commercialise, he pointed out, otherwise it would not be able to sustain this expenditure on the AI without any revenue from the fees.
The company’s decision came after it had seen that its products were being accepted by consumers, who were willing to pay a premium to use Doubao, analysts said.
Mr Su Lian Jye, chief analyst at tech research group Omdia, said that by offering premium features, ByteDance risks losing its clients to other chatbots but believes in “the ability of their product to keep customers.”
Despite this, there is still a mystery about how many Chinese customers would be willing to come out with premium subscriptions to Doubao.
The subscription plan was reported in the last week following a notice on Doubao’s download page for the App Store, and several users resorted to social media to say they would no longer use the chatbot if they were to be charged, or if they’d have to find an alternate – a free one like Alibaba’s Qwen or DeepSeek.
One Weibo user from Guangdong wrote about the disastrous experience of Baidu when it attempted to charge fees: “Look at what happened to Baidu when it tried charging fees – it flopped miserably.”
In the late part of 2023, Baidu introduced a premium version of Ernie Bot and later had to recede in the early part of 2025, when other free versions of Ernie Bot appeared, like DeepSeek. The AI application of Baidu’s chatbot is not included in China’s top 10 most popular AI apps.
But not all people were against it. The 37-year-old Nicky Wang, a consultant based in Guangzhou, says he’d pay for Doubao – his top Chinese chatbot among the ones he tested – if he ever needed to use its higher-priced services.
He now writes daily with both Doubao and ChatGPT, using them to research ideas for work, and to strategise for computer gaming, and says that it makes sense for those who use them to do so to pay, “tokens after all need money”.
For 23-year-old Zane Liu, a master’s student in Guangzhou said, “it is hard not to pay for Doubao, as its ability is obviously not on par with ChatGPT, which is used for schoolwork. I’d like to pay for ChatGPT!”
ChatGPT’s plans for individual users currently range from $11 to $30 to $138 per month, while Doubao’s plans are $13, $37 and $93 per month, respectively.
Analysts point out that this is an experiment for ByteDance that’s worthy of others in the space to learn from if there is a viable way to monetise consumer AI assistants.
“But if Doubao, the biggest by a long shot, can’t convert a meaningful share to paid subscribers, then it’s not just ByteDance, ” wrote Poe Zhao in his Hello China Tech newsletter that dissects developments in the Chinese tech industry.
That would imply that standalone AI subscriptions will not have the same structural success in the Chinese consumer market, he said.
