The problem with Big Tech AI pricing
Let me show you something that bothers me every time I look at it.
ChatGPT costs $20/month. That's the baseline price to access a capable AI assistant in 2026.
Now look at what $20 means in different places:
| Country | $20/month ChatGPT | % of avg monthly salary |
|---|---|---|
| USA | $20 | ~0.5% |
| UK | £16 | ~0.8% |
| India | Rs1,650 | ~8% |
| Nigeria | ₦32,000 | ~25% |
| Philippines | ₱1,120 | ~12% |
| Kenya | KSh2,600 | ~15% |
| Indonesia | Rp320,000 | ~10% |
| Pakistan | PKR5,600 | ~18% |
For a developer in Lagos or Manila, ChatGPT costs the equivalent of a week's salary. Every month.
This isn't an accident
Big Tech AI pricing is optimized for one market: North America and Western Europe. The $20 price point makes sense if your benchmark is a San Francisco engineer's disposable income.
It makes zero sense if your benchmark is a Nairobi developer earning KSh17,000/month.
The result: billions of people in the fastest-growing developer markets on earth are locked out of AI productivity tools — not because the technology costs that much to run, but because the pricing was never designed with them in mind.
What this actually costs to run
Here's a number Big Tech doesn't advertise: the actual compute cost to run Claude API calls at typical usage levels is under $2/month for most individual developers.
I know this because I built something to prove it.
SimplyLouie: what $2/month actually looks like
I run SimplyLouie — a $2/month Claude API wrapper that started as a joke about the absurdity of AI pricing and turned into something real.
Local prices, because geography shouldn't determine access:
- 🇮🇳 India: Rs165/month
- 🇳🇬 Nigeria: ₦3,200/month
- 🇵🇭 Philippines: ₱112/month
- 🇰🇪 Kenya: KSh260/month
- 🇬🇭 Ghana: GH₵25/month
- 🇮🇩 Indonesia: Rp32,000/month
- 🇧🇷 Brazil: R$10/month
- 🇲🇽 Mexico: MX$35/month
Same API. Same Claude model. Different price because you were born in a different country and that's fine.
The developer API angle
For developers who want to build on top of this, there's also a direct API:
curl -X POST https://simplylouie.com/api/chat \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
-d '{
"message": "explain async/await in JavaScript",
"model": "claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022"
}'
Response:
{
"response": "Async/await is syntactic sugar over Promises...",
"tokens_used": 247,
"cost_usd": 0.000074
}
$2/month covers thousands of API calls at typical dev usage. The developer docs are here.
Why 50% of revenue goes to animal rescue
The other thing Big Tech doesn't do: donate half of revenue to rescue dogs.
SimplyLouie donates 50% of every dollar to animal rescue organizations. It started because the product was named after a rescue dog. It stayed because it felt right.
If AI pricing is going to be extractive by default, at least one option shouldn't be.
The actual problem
The problem with Big Tech AI pricing isn't that it's expensive in absolute terms. It's that it's expensive in relative terms for most of the world's developers.
The next billion users of AI tools won't come from San Francisco. They'll come from Lagos, Manila, Nairobi, Jakarta, and Dhaka.
If the pricing never adjusts for that reality, the productivity gains from AI will compound wealth in places that are already wealthy — and the gap grows wider.
$2/month doesn't fix that. But it's a start.
SimplyLouie is $2/month globally, with local pricing for 8 countries. 7-day free trial, no credit card tricks. simplylouie.com
