On June 24, Phoenix New Media Tech learned that Doubao had officially launched three paid subscription tiers: Standard at 68 yuan a month, Enhanced at 200 yuan a month, and Premium at 500 yuan a month.

Phoenix New Media Tech learned that Doubao has now fully integrated the Doubao 2.1 family of large models, improving overall model performance, while everyday use for free users remains unaffected.

The long-expected paid offering has finally landed.

Over the past month, debate over Doubao’s move to charge users has barely stopped. In early May, a quiet update to the App Store page added a paid-service statement, sparking discussion over whether free AI would last. Doubao Pro later entered a quiet gray-scale test before its official launch. The question outside observers kept asking was: why would an AI app that is already close to a national-level consumer product start charging now, and what problem is it trying to solve?

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Is 500 Yuan a Month Expensive?

Most of the public debate has centered on the price itself.

In the global market, Doubao’s three-tier pricing makes for an easy comparison.

ChatGPT has several tiers: Go at $8 a month, or about 54 yuan; Plus at $20 a month, or about 135 yuan; and Pro at $100 a month, or about 677 yuan. OpenAI also offers a $200-a-month Pro tier. Claude likewise has Pro at $20 a month and Max at $100 or $200 a month. Gemini Advanced is priced at $19.99 a month.

Chart: Doubao Pro

Doubao Standard, at 68 yuan, is also cheaper than ChatGPT Plus at $20, or about 135 yuan.

ChatGPT Pro costs about 16,295 yuan a year, while Doubao Pro’s annual plan is 5,088 yuan, less than one-third of ChatGPT Pro’s price.

Chart: Doubao Pro

In China, Kimi currently offers four tiers: Entry at 49 yuan a month, Efficiency at 99 yuan a month, Pro at 199 yuan a month, and Premium at 699 yuan a month. Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen and Tencent’s Yuanbao still offer basic consumer functions for free, while mainly charging developers and enterprises for data calls.

In that sense, Doubao Standard is still priced in the middle of the market. But whether it is expensive cannot be judged by price alone.

Sam Altman himself has said that OpenAI loses money on its $200-a-month Pro subscription. In other words, even OpenAI has not managed to make money from high-end subscriptions. Whether Doubao’s 500-yuan Pro plan can turn a profit depends on whether users feel it is worth the price.

Volcano Engine President Tan Dai said at the conference that only when model capabilities cross a “qualitative inflection point” can they truly meet the needs of enterprises and individuals in production scenarios. Globally, the first video generation model to cross that point was Seedance 2.0; in coding and agents, it was Claude Opus 4.6.

According to official disclosures, Doubao 2.1 Pro has made capability leaps in three core areas: coding, agents, and VLMs, or vision-language models. It outperformed Claude Opus 4.6 in multiple benchmarks and has formally crossed the production-grade qualitative inflection point.

We also tested Doubao Pro ourselves, and it did feel smooth in complex scenarios. In particular, after enabling office task mode on the PC version, users can authorize access to the local computer and start an agent-driven office task mode.

It is worth noting that local computer operations require explicit user authorization. Only then can Doubao help use applications, browsers, and files on the computer to organize local materials, classify files, process documents, fill in spreadsheets, move information, and coordinate work across apps. It is essentially a “lobster” operating within a safe and controllable scope, with support for Skills calls.

In our test, we had Doubao Pro run scheduled tasks, such as a daily hot-news briefing, and produce a research report that could be exported directly as a PDF.

Doubao Pro has also embedded some Feishu capabilities, integrating Feishu’s office suite, including widely used online documents, spreadsheets, and PPT tools. It can independently produce online documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that meet professional delivery requirements. Phoenix New Media Tech also learned that Doubao Pro will be further integrated with Feishu in the future.

Overall, Doubao Pro and the free version target completely different user groups, or solve problems in completely different scenarios. The Pro version is better suited to high-productivity, complex work scenarios. That also means the launch of Doubao Pro does not affect actual use of the free version.

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The Computing Power Bill Is Hotter Than Expected

According to QuestMobile, Doubao had about 345 million monthly active users as of the first quarter of 2026. That active-user figure puts it far ahead of the rest of the industry.

But user scale is both a sweetener and a weight.

Some 345 million people are asking questions, generating images, and holding video conversations every day. Behind each interaction is a real computing power cost. According to the South China Morning Post, ByteDance has raised its 2026 AI capital expenditure plan to more than 200 billion yuan, or about $30 billion, at least 25% higher than the 160 billion yuan plan initially discussed late last year. ByteDance has even discussed annual AI capital spending as high as $70 billion.

LatePost has also reported that Doubao, ByteDance’s flagship product, consumes tens of millions of yuan worth of computing power per day on average, with daily active users above 200 million but daily revenue below 1 million yuan.

Volcano Engine has disclosed that, as of June this year, daily average token calls to the Doubao large model had surpassed 180 trillion, up more than tenfold over the past year. When the model first launched in May 2024, the figure was just over 100 billion. In less than two years, it has risen 1,500-fold. A May research report from Guolian Minsheng Securities estimated that, even using the cheapest Doubao model, the cost of providing one day of free AI service for Doubao would be 132 million yuan to 240 million yuan.

ByteDance has already made substantial technical optimizations. Doubao 2.0 improved inference efficiency by 43%. In long-context scenarios, its time to first token is more than 25% lower than the industry mainstream, and its inference cost per 10,000 tokens is 38% of the compliant access path for leading overseas models. Even so, keeping free usage running for 200 million daily active users leaves a hole that is extremely hard to fill.

This is not ByteDance’s problem alone. Alibaba’s capital expenditure in fiscal 2025 was about 93.4 billion yuan. Over the past four quarters, it invested about 120 billion yuan in AI and cloud infrastructure. Alibaba management has said total spending in fiscal 2026 will be about 145 billion yuan to 150 billion yuan, with more than 75% going into AI. Tencent spent 18 billion yuan last year on developing new AI products, and this year’s investment will at least double.

In this AI arms race, every leading internet giant has burned real money. That is forcing them to find a viable way to survive.

As the token reckoning arrives, some trends are already taking shape. Since the start of this year, MiniMax, Zhipu, Kimi, and Alibaba Cloud have successively adjusted pricing for their developer-facing Coding Plans, all moving in the same direction: tightening free usage and shifting to token-based billing. On June 2, MiniMax publicly apologized for a sudden change in its billing method, its second apology of this kind this year. Zhipu’s GLM series APIs have gone through three rounds of price increases, with a cumulative rise of more than 60%. Institutional monitoring data confirms the trend: over the past year, weekly token consumption rose from 2.1T to 24.5T, and since 2026, weekly token consumption has increased by 280%.

All vendors are trying to end endless token consumption. Inside major companies, token usage is no longer a metric for competition, and many vendors have taken back free token quotas from employees.

At this stage, Doubao Pro is only an experiment.

According to 36Kr, ByteDance will not use paid conversion as a core assessment metric in 2026. Its top priority is to validate the functional value of the Pro version.

Put another way, ByteDance is not counting on the 500-yuan monthly fee to make big money. What it wants is to pull the heaviest energy users out of the free pool and serve them separately, with separate pricing.

Free basic functions remain in place, with quotas unchanged for everyday Q&A, writing, image generation, voice and video conversations, and other features. Paid benefits are aimed only at high-computing-power scenarios such as software development, data analysis, professional design, and financial analysis. In a market where almost every Chinese large-model provider says it is free, the first player to post a price list was always going to take the most criticism. But with daily consumption of 180 trillion tokens on the table, who can still confidently promise “free forever”? The computing power bill does not lie. The era of high-value tokens has arrived, and Doubao has simply opened a new window for everyone.