A ChatGPT Pro subscription costs 38.6 months of income in low-income countries.

Here are the GDP per capita for low and middle income (LMIC) and Low Income (LI) countries from World Bank*:

ChatGPT-Pro, Claude Opus Pro and Gemini Ultra cost the following per month and year:

And how many months someone in low-income, low and middle come and low middle income will need to work to afford this subscription (per year basis)

So, according to the graph above, if you are in a low-income country, you will need 38.6 months to afford ChatGPT Pro. And if you are in a Low and Middle income country, you will need half an year of income to afford Gemini Ultra.

These pro-models are primarily suited for cutting edge work. If you live in a high-income country, you are already far far ahead in terms of productivity (Output per hour of work) **.

How much do these pro models push you above if you are located in USA as compared to, say someone in India, or Pakistan or Nigeria? We do not know yet. But a lot of people find them very very good for the cutting-edge work.

I find this very troubling for two reasons. First, while Claude and OpenAI are new, Google has been around for a long time. It should have thought better about pricing so that the tool is within the reach of the developing world.

Second, at least, Claude is better that it gives you access to Claude Opus 4.1 with Extended Thinking. Though you do not get a lot of prompts to run. I think Google and OpenAI should do that. Something is better than nothing.

How do you make this situation better? The big companies shall argue that they cannot afford extending the pro models to the developing world at a cost that is reflective of the incomes in those parts of the world. I understand that. But can they, at least extend it to some universities?

Or you can argue that the prices shall eventually tumble down, and we should wait. An argument can be made that these high prices subsidize the expansion of second tier of models to everyone. But do companies actually earn a lot from the expensive pro-models?

This is the epitome of AI Access Gap.

* https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?contextual=default&locations=XM-XO-XN

** https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-hour-pennworldtable?tab=discrete-bar&time=2019

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