Recently, the open-source AI chat tool LobeChat announced that its cloud service, after a month of public beta testing, has achieved a monthly revenue of over 30,000 RMB (approximately 4,000 USD), with over 60 paying users, marking a preliminary success.
The LobeChat team expressed that this achievement has shown them the potential for commercialization of open-source projects. With just around 60 paying users, the team's daily operations can be supported, which is a stark contrast to the traditional internet approach of pursuing millions of users.
Official website: https://lobechat.com/welcome
However, LobeChat is also facing challenges with low conversion rates to paid users. Currently, LobeChat's cloud service has over 7,000 registered users, but less than 1% are paying users. The team believes this could be due to intense market competition, numerous user choices, and the functionality of LobeChat's cloud service still lagging behind mature products like ChatGPT and Claude.
The LobeChat team considers the open-source strategy as one of the main reasons for the low conversion rate. They admit that users who choose open-source solutions often prefer to use the service for free, making it difficult to monetize from them.
To address this issue, LobeChat plans to focus on developing differentiated features and value-added services for its cloud service in the future, such as the upcoming file upload/knowledge base conversation feature.
Additionally, the LobeChat team plans to adjust the current fixed usage subscription model. They have found that this model is not suitable for AI products that charge by token usage, as users may exhaust all their tokens shortly after purchasing a basic subscription, rendering them unable to continue using the service.
In the future, LobeChat will adopt a relatively low base service subscription fee + on-demand token purchase model to alleviate the subscription and usage pressure on users.
The LobeChat team also shared the challenges they encountered in product design, such as the cumulative increase in token usage for multi-turn conversations. Users often do not realize this issue, leading to a mismatch between actual usage experience and expectations.
The LobeChat team promises to bear the additional usage losses caused by product design flaws and calls on users to contact them promptly when encountering issues.
Finally, the LobeChat team revealed that the current monthly revenue of 30,000 RMB mostly covers the operational costs of AI APIs and infrastructure, leaving limited profit margins. They will continue to focus on the MRR (monthly recurring revenue) indicator to ensure the sustainable development of the project.
Reference: https://x.com/arvin17x/status/1824474651877314796