Why pay for AI apps on Android when there are plenty of free options available?

If you've spent any time on social media recently, you'll find hundreds of snobby posts and threads declaring you outdated. at least I have a dozen or more AI apps installed on my phone, and most Android flagship smartphones are chock full of generative AI tricks—think the marketing gimmicks for the Google Pixel 8 and Galaxy S24—while Apple is preparing to add its own tools this fall.

So, with all these companies competing to offer the most amazing AI capabilities without making users pay a dime, does it even make sense to pay for AI tools in any other than truly niche cases?

There are AI apps for this, that, and that.

You see them everywhere!

Want to have a friendly chat with an AI (no tricks, of course)? It's easy with one of the dozens of chatbots available. Need to create an artistic image within seconds? AI can do it in no time. Need to quickly put together a code snippet? As Apple's ads used to say, there's an app for that. Want to create a professional marketing campaign or presentation? Yep, there are plenty of options for that too.

You get the point. AI apps claim to be able to do so many different things that it's easy to have an existential crisis about machines beating us to our daily tasks. It's amazing to see how quickly and efficiently these tools can create things with just a simple text prompt. And we're surrounded by AI apps like ChatGPT, which just released its latest version for free to all users, not to mention Google Gemini and Copilot. If it were possible, Microsoft would put a Copilot key on every existing keyboard in the world.

Besides these general-purpose AI apps, there are many more specialized apps on the market, such as Claude, Perplexity, Ideogram, etc. Although many of you may not have heard of them, these services are not only powerful but also attract many users, and all for one reason: they are free to use.

It's a pain to have to pay for an app

Especially when free alternatives exist.

Most of these services can be used without creating an account. No need to add another monthly subscription to your credit card. Some apps have certain usage limits, but they are very generous for regular use, even if you play too much with these tools. In fact, these companies are adamant about making their services free, and there are two main reasons for that:

The first is simple: the more users who try the app, the more engagement there is. And that engagement has a direct or indirect impact on the balance sheet and the type of investor funding the company can raise. After all, it's all a business. That's why free services are expanded to attract more users. All at onceThis is something that wouldn't be possible with paid content that doesn't offer anything free.

The second reason is something you've probably heard many times before: data is the new oil. When many users interact with an AI tool, they are essentially training the AI ​​tool on the exchange. you Ideally it should be paid for, but it's not. Ask anyone in the industry and they'll tell you how important this organic training data is for your AI to learn from real queries and user patterns. It's a gold mine, to say the least.

These companies themselves have a strong incentive to offer their services for free to the general public, while offering certain features to professionals on a subscription basis.

Google's winning model

Google knew one thing perfectly well

You don't need You have to pay for Google's services. Of course, the free version has its own limitations, such as photo storage limits and YouTube ads. But most people aren't willing to pay at least tens of dollars a month just to send a nice birthday message in Gmail or record their monthly expenses in a Google spreadsheet. That's why billions of people use Google's services every day. Other tech giants, such as Apple and Microsoft, also offer free versions of many of their core services.

More recently, OpenAI has also joined the race with the most powerful LLM, GPT-4o. This model is much more powerful than its predecessor due to its multimodal features. However, OpenAI is also offering it to free users (with limited usage), meaning you don't have to pay $20 per month to access it. By doing so, OpenAI can put pressure on other companies to offer their best products for free as well.

And it's already happening. Google has made many of its flashy AI features, such as Magic Editor, Magic Eraser, and Photo Unblur, available for free with limitations. Previously, you needed a Google One subscription or a Pixel phone to use these features. Samsung may start charging for generative AI features on its Galaxy S24 series starting in 2026, but there will always be free alternatives from Google and others that are just as good or better. Google will likely be focusing on AI features in the coming years to stay one step ahead when it comes to smartphone users.

Paid services exist for specialized use cases or to provide slightly better functionality than the free services, but that slight difference may never be felt or justified by the average user. We are literally fighting with people considering AI-generated content to be real, so finding the difference between two AI-generated pieces of content is a big enough challenge to ignore now and in the long term.