Hacker News Reader

Comment by WarmWash | Hacker News Reader

Consumers should consider cancelling their AI subscriptions if they don't like datacenters.

Most people don't have AI subscriptions. A lot of the most fervent detractor hate AI to the core and refuse to use it as much as possible.

Perhaps we should charge AI subscription "tax" to pay for more renewable energy.

Most consumers don't have any AI subscriptions. Lots of people's primary experience of AI is it being forced on them through integration into existing products and services, more "greed and hubris".

i, an avid AI user, have never paid a subscription, as a point of data!

The day I'm force to pay for it, I'll stop using it.

Most consumers are willingly using AI. But they're using the free versions.

ChatGPT is the #1 most popular app on the app store, with nearly a billion weekly active users.

Is there any evidence that individualization of responsibility works better than government policy?

Personally I see no contradiction in using a product despite wanting policies that prevent it: it just implies that you understand the tragedy of the commons.

Not sure if this is sarcastic, but there are effectively no consumers (as opposed to corporations) with AI subscriptions; the number of paid ChatGPT users is a rounding error. In the long run we should not expect the number of paid consumers for LLMs to be significantly greater than the number of paid consumers for search engines.

There are 50 million consumers with paid ChatGPT subscriptions as of Feb 2026.

This is already significantly greater than the number of paid subscribers to search engines. AFAIK that's just Kagi, and they only have ~100k subscriptions.

ChatGPT claims 1B MAU, so with 50M subscribers that's a 5% attach rate. And unfortunately for OpenAI there are only 8B humans on the planet, meaning an optimistic upper bound of 400M paying users if every human on the planet (this is an extremely generous upper limit, because the users currently without access to ChatGPT are statistically poorer). At $20/user/month even this absurdly optimistic projection doesn't break $100B annual revenue, which itself isn't even a quarter of Apple's annual revenue. And we all know these subscription prices are heavily subsidized and are going to increase, which, while it might improve OpenAI's financial outlook, definitely isn't going to have anything other than a negative effect on the number of subscribers, which is the point here.

What if we never signed up?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com