Olivia Moore, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, published a report on the top 100 consumer AI apps, and TechCrunch interviewed her about why she sees opportunity despite the bleak economics of consumer AI. ChatGPT remains the largest player by a wide margin, while Suno and ElevenLabs are showing staying power. Moore’s report also identifies about half a dozen consumer categories with no meaningful AI entrants yet.

On monetization, Moore resists the framing that the market needs more paying households. The State of Markets report notes only 2.2% of U.S. households pay for AI, but Moore says she is more interested in moving beyond subscription dollars and API charges. She believes most consumers would rather have free, ad-supported access with an option to subscribe to remove ads. She also acknowledges the marginal cost of AI services remains much higher than classic internet services, but points to improvements: ChatGPT launched an $8-a-month Go plan that presumably runs on cheaper models, and more consumer companies are building on open-source models. Still, the users generating revenue today are mostly doing coding and technical automation, which may require frontier intelligence. As more builders make the model a component rather than the product itself, Moore expects lower-cost models to be used more often.

Moore also describes a blurring line between consumer and enterprise. In her earlier piece ‘The Great Expansion,’ she noted that pre-AI consumer-first companies like Canva took six or seven years to add teams or enterprise plans. Now Gamma, ElevenLabs, and Cursor start as consumer products and become majority-enterprise within 18 months. In her view, most consumer AI is really prosumer AI. The revenue list reflects that: the three categories power users pay for are product-building apps (Lovable, Replit, Fal), product marketing AI ad generators (Higgsfield, HeyGen), and general work management (Manus, Fireflies AI, Granola).

The untouched categories are the bigger opportunity. Social apps, dating apps, marketplaces, retail, travel, finance, and health have no entrants in the top 100 list. Moore says that needs to change over the next six months. True consumer AI, in the pre-AI sense of consumer products, has not really been seen yet; it is definitely very early.