Focus on AI
Claude is getting consumers to spend real money on AI
ChatGPT and Claude look like the same product. They’re becoming very different businesses.
By Dan Frommer on Monday, May 4, 2026 at 10:00 am
Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer, and just back from a quick weekend TGV trip to Basel with my son. Go check out the Vitra campus and design museum if it’s ever convenient — a great example of a company using its land to host customers and community with neat architecture and public spaces, not just shoo them into a corny tour and a gift shop full of bad merch.
Also, two quick plugs: I spoke with Sally Ekus, the food and lifestyle literary agent, about cookbooks and how they intersect with recent trends in eating, drinking, and brand-building. I also joined the Marketing Meeting podcast with Itir Eraslan to talk about some of our recent Consumer Trends research — protein preferences, GLP-1s, and more.
Presented by Aboard
Every tool your business runs on was designed for a thousand other businesses, too. You’ve spent years adapting how you work to fit someone else’s software — because having your own was never a realistic option. It is now.
The cost and speed of building custom software have dropped so dramatically that it’s now a real option for consumer brands, not just giant companies with engineering departments.
Think about what you’d build if you could: The operational tool that doesn’t exist yet. The dashboard that would actually show you what matters. The workflow your team currently runs on spreadsheets and inertia. You can probably have it now — built around how your company actually works, in weeks instead of months.
Aboard is a software studio led by experienced builders who’ve shipped for some of the world’s biggest companies. We use modern tools and AI to move fast, but every project is led by senior engineers and designers who ensure the software is secure, professionally built, and actually works. Custom business tools, at a speed and price that would’ve been unthinkable a few years ago.
Claude, the AI service owned by Anthropic, has a fraction of ChatGPT’s paid users, but its users are spending dramatically more on a per-user basis — and the gap is widening.
Today, millions of American consumers pay for an AI subscription, primarily ChatGPT, which is owned by OpenAI. Claude has been a distant follower.
But around the end of last year, something started to shift. Claude hit an inflection point in paid consumer spending, according to transaction data from Consumer Edge, which tracks US consumer credit and debit card purchases.
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