> I suspect it works like gym memberships, and the companies mostly make their money from people who don't use the subscriptions all that much.

I think it's like that, but not quite. The people who have a subscription but barely use it were probably never doing any serious work with AI in the first place. I.e., why would they get a subscription when their one or two chat questions (or, "make a picture of me as a superhero" prompts) per day can be had for free?

Especially with Claude, I think people who subscribe skew very heavily towards people that can very easily make more than $20 worth of queries in a month. And then there's the not-insignificant number of people who are tokenmaxxing.

It's like the gym membership model except ten percent of members are able to spend 72 hours per day at the gym while the rest spend 8 IMO.

Based on the people I know, they're paying because when ask they want the smartest model to be the one answering. There's still quite a difference between models.