ChatGPT isn't the Only AI App That's Growing its Revenue

When many think of an "AI app" they likely think of ChatGPT, which explains the incredible revenue growth the app saw in Q3 (but pretty much since release). And while ChatGPT is by far the biggest, it isn't the only one that's seeing revenue growing.

I was interested in seeing how apps that aren't built around ChatGPT are faring on the App Store and Google Play, and if users are really spending on them, so I tracked the revenue of Claude, which has its own model, Microsoft Copilot, which has a model that's derived from ChatGPT but isn't ChatGPT, and Perplexity, a search engine built around ChatGPT which in my mind is novel enough (and that's why I put the before).

Note: I didn't include Gemini because Google's rollout is pretty messy and isn't like any of the other apps.

This year, between January and September, consumers already spent $13.3M across the trio of apps, according to our estimates. It's important to note that Microsoft Copilot didn't start earning real money until May and Claude launched in May (and later on Android), so this total is not exactly descriptive.

Possibly more descriptive is September's $2.8M in consumer spending (aka. gross revenue) across the three, which grew quite a bit since May. In fact, revenue of the trio has been growing at double-digit pace every month this year. It's slowed down a bit as the total continues to rise, but that's pretty expected.

Our estimates show revenue rose 11% in September.

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Not All Apps Grew Equally

Of the three, it's Claude that's been growing the most. It beat both other apps in September with 22% month-over-month revenue growth. More than double Perplexity's (10%) and a whole bunch more than Copilot's (1%). It's still not earning as much as Perplexity and it just overtook Copilot, but I expect that to change by the end of the year and for Claude to top both and then start growing the gap.

But first it has to fill the gap. Claude trails the other two when we look at total spend, which is led by Perplexity ($7.3M), followed by Copilot ($3.6M), and Claude in last place with $2.4M. But looking at the trend, it's only a matter of months until that changes.

Keeping it real, I'll remind you that ChatGPT earns more 15x that EVERY MONTH. So Claude has a lot of chasing to do...

But what I'm more interested in is AI merging into search, aka Perplexity. The more I use ChatGPT the less I use Google, and I don't think I'm the only one. Once that trend catches on I'm sure we'll see more competition, including OpenAI's SearchGPT.

Looking at Perplexity's revenue growth, it's clear future of search is changing. The only question is who's going to be the Google of this new era.