Only about 2% of US households pay for an AI tool.
Sit with that for a second. AI is the fastest-adopted technology in history, hundreds of millions of people use it every week, and 98% of households have looked at the price and said no thanks.
The industry's answer has been to keep charging $20 a month and fight over the 2%. I think that's exactly backwards, and it quietly shapes what gets built. Charge a subscription and your users become tech workers with corporate cards. Every roadmap decision starts bending toward Silicon Valley, whatever your intentions were. Meanwhile the teacher, the realtor and the salon owner, the people an assistant would help the hardest, never make it past the paywall.
We tested this ourselves: we made Pally completely free, and our weekly active users tripled in about a week. The demand was always there. The price was the filter.
Principle: Assistants will get paid like sales channels, not like software
When an agent books the restaurant, orders the gift or switches the phone plan, a merchant just won a customer. Merchants already pay booking platforms and affiliates for exactly that outcome, and they'll pay agents the same way. The user pays nothing, and the assistant earns on finished work.
Two things make this inevitable now rather than someday. Agents can finally transact, and the cost of serving a free user is collapsing.
And one thing can kill it: the moment a merchant can pay to change what an agent recommends, trust dies. People only let an assistant spend for them while it works only for them. Merchants should pay when a task completes, never to be recommended. Any assistant that sells its recommendations will lose to one that doesn't.
The exception worth naming: work tools sold as seats can keep charging seats. The flip happens in everyday life.
Put it to work this week
Ask an AI assistant to book or order something from your own business, and write down every place it gets stuck. That list is your to-do list.
Put prices, availability and policies in plain text on your site. Agents read text. They can't read your PDF menu.
Join the affiliate and booking programs in your category now. That's the pipe agents will route demand through first.
If you're building AI: price your free tier at today's model costs, then again at next year's. The paywall you think you need may be gone within a year.
Write the one sentence that keeps recommendations clean (who can pay you, and for what), and publish it.
Pick one metric that counts tasks finished for users, and watch it instead of sign-ups.
One next step: ask an AI assistant to spend $20 with your business today, and fix the first thing it trips over.
~ Haz
P.S. Hit reply and tell me where you think I'm wrong on this. I read everything.