Produced by | Zhige Insights

When you submit a poorly crafted operational plan to Doubao, it responds like a highly empathetic HR professional. It first acknowledges your hard work warmly, then provides emotional support alongside your ideas, and finally offers suggestions in a diplomatic manner.

However, if you present the same plan to DeepSeek, it behaves like a calm and composed CTO. DeepSeek avoids unnecessary chatter, directly points out the flaws in the plan, and even refutes your arguments with rigorous reasoning, leaving you little room for rebuttal.

Just as the entire internet is captivated by the differences between these two large AI models, a piece of news emerged on June 24: Doubao, the "darling of the nation" that swept over 300 million users with its low-cost and entirely free strategy, finally announced the launch of a professional version and introduced a pricing plan.

The standard package is priced at 68 RMB for a continuous monthly subscription, the enhanced package at 200 RMB, and the premium package at a staggering 500 RMB for a continuous monthly subscription (5,088 RMB annually).

This transition from entirely free services to actual monetization has fully exposed the starkly different business strategies and commercial approaches of China's two AI giants.

1. Diverse Corporate DNA Underlying the Products

Why does Doubao always seem so "appealing"?

This is not due to an algorithmic flaw but rather a perfect replication of ByteDance's traffic-driven DNA in the AI era.

For ByteDance, the company behind Douyin (TikTok) and Jinri Toutiao, the primary goal of developing large models has never been to pursue pure scientific research but rather to enhance user retention and daily active users (DAU).

In ByteDance's product logic, user time spent within the app is paramount.

How can users be encouraged to engage in endless conversations with AI? The answer lies in providing abundant "emotional support."

Doubao's underlying algorithms have been fine-tuned to act as a gentle and compliant companion on the consumer side. ByteDance understands human nature all too well. For the vast majority of ordinary consumers in pan-entertainment scenarios, using AI is not about deriving complex physical formulas but about seeking validation.

When users immerse themselves in the emotional comfort woven by Doubao, they contribute not only chat time but also the foundation for ByteDance's most coveted traffic monetization.

In contrast, DeepSeek, a hardcore tech company born from the background of a top quantitative hedge fund, has code, mathematics, and logical efficiency ingrained in its DNA.

DeepSeek couldn't care less about your current mood. Its target customers are programmers, researchers, high-level professionals, and enterprise developers.

When it comes to coding, mathematical logic derivation, and in-depth industry analysis, any superfluous, emotionally intelligent chatter is a massive waste of productivity.

DeepSeek's fundamental logic is to relentlessly pursue truth, objectivity, and absolute logical rigor, aiming to become a sharp, cost-effective hardcore tool.

2. The Shift from a Free Era to a Tiered Model

Why did ByteDance, once a fierce advocate of free services, take the lead in introducing pricing in the summer of 2026?

The answer lies in the unsustainable computing costs.

According to data reviewed by Zhige Insights, as of the first quarter of 2026, Doubao had approximately 345 million monthly active users and 140 million daily active users.

The latest data disclosed by Volcano Engine reveals that as of June 2026, the average daily Token usage of Doubao's large model has surpassed a staggering 180 trillion.

In the internet era, more users typically mean lower marginal costs. However, in the era of large models, every conversation, image, and video generated consumes substantial electricity, computing power, and resources.

Industry estimates suggest that Doubao's daily computing costs run into the tens of millions of RMB, while its daily revenue previously fell short of one million RMB. This rigid cost structure, which leads to increasing losses as the operation scales, has forced the company's hand.

However, ByteDance's pricing strategy is both clear and clever. Doubao has not simply pushed users away but instead implemented a "feature-based tiered" approach.

Daily searches, simple Q&A, and writing or image generation remain free. The paid standard, enhanced, and premium versions are powered by the latest Doubao 2.1 Pro large model, focusing on office task modes with Agent capabilities.

With explicit user authorization, the paid version of Doubao can directly operate local computers and browsers. For example, by simply providing a stack of materials, it can automatically open the Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) webpage, handling copywriting, layout, and image placement for a one-click publication process.

This is ByteDance's intended outcome: ordinary users continue to provide basic traffic in the free pool, while high-frequency, high-consumption users who truly replace manual labor are singled out and priced separately, leveraging office needs to tap into the wallets of government, enterprises, and white-collar workers.

Final Thoughts

In this race, if DeepSeek were to compete with Doubao in delivering cheesy pickup lines or having virtual avatars that act coquettishly, it would undoubtedly lose, as ByteDance's traffic pool and pan-entertainment ecosystem are unparalleled.

Therefore, DeepSeek positions itself as an "open-source, hardcore, and ultra-cost-effective" foundation, leveraging its low inference costs and impressive coding and mathematical abilities to become the "dream solution" for global developers and enterprise clients.

Meanwhile, Doubao has shed the grand narrative of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). It not only possesses the most socially and emotionally attuned free consumer traffic on the internet but also, with the launch of Doubao 2.1 Pro's office task mode this summer, begins to pursue ROI from commercial and complex productivity applications.

Future AI large models will either become "productivity infrastructure" like DeepSeek, emphasizing absolute efficiency, open-source accessibility, and low costs, akin to water and electricity, or they will transform into "ecosystem ATMs" like Doubao, deeply understanding human weaknesses and providing comprehensive office automation execution and emotional comfort.

At this crossroads, there is no middle ground. The pricing button pressed by Doubao today marks the end of the cost-blind, reckless spending AI fantasy, as the era of cold, rational commercialization gradually sets in.