AI's real customer is developers, not chatbot users
Every platform eventually discovers who actually pays the bills.
Google: advertisers, not searchers. Facebook: advertisers, not users. AI: developers, not chatbot users.
900 million people use ChatGPT. 5.6% pay. But a single developer on a coding agent burns $200+/month in tokens — 10-20x a consumer subscriber.
April 2026: both Anthropic and OpenAI quietly switched enterprise plans from per-seat to usage-based pricing. That’s the tell.
→ Uber burned through its annual AI budget in months.
→ SpaceX’s S-1: $1.25 billion/month committed to Anthropic compute.
→ Anthropic’s rumored Q2 revenue: $10.9 billion. A year ago, third-party API customers were $1.2B of $4B total.
The consumer chatbot was the demo. The coding agent was the product. Turns out AI’s product-market fit isn’t replacing developers. It’s selling to them. (at least for now :P)