South Koreans now pay more for AI chatbots than for Netflix. Hankyung Aicel, an alternative data firm tracking credit card transactions, reports that payments for seven AI services hit 80.3 billion won (roughly $55-60 million) in December 2025. Netflix's average monthly take in Korea during 2024 was 75 billion won.
The comparison isn't quite fair
There's an obvious asterisk here: the AI number includes business accounts. Netflix is consumer-only. The average business subscriber paid 107,400 won (about $74) per month, versus 34,700 won ($24) for individuals. Corporate accounts are pulling the average up considerably, and Hankyung Aicel doesn't break out what portion of that $55-60 million comes from enterprise versus personal use.
Still, the transaction volume tells a story worth examining. Credit card payments for AI services jumped from 52,000 in January 2024 to 1.666 million by December 2025. That's a 32x increase in under two years, regardless of who's paying.
ChatGPT owns this market
OpenAI's dominance in Korea is almost comical. ChatGPT commands 71.5% of all AI subscription payments, with Google's Gemini trailing at 11% and Anthropic's Claude at 10.7%. The remaining 7% splits among Perplexity, Midjourney, local player Wrtn, and a few others.
OpenAI knows Korea matters. The company established a Seoul office in 2025 and claims Korea has more paid ChatGPT subscribers than any country outside the US. Kakao, Korea's dominant messaging platform, integrated ChatGPT directly into KakaoTalk in late 2025, putting GPT-5 in front of 50 million users.
That integration might explain why the paid subscriber count is growing so fast. When AI is two taps away in your default chat app, friction disappears.
What this says about the broader market
Hankyung Aicel CEO Kim Hyung-min frames this as generative AI becoming a "regular subscription product," which feels directionally right but undersells the speed. Korean consumers adopted streaming services over roughly a decade. They're adopting AI subscriptions in months.
The annual run rate for AI subscriptions in Korea now sits around 964 billion won (roughly $654 million). For perspective, Coupang, Korea's largest e-commerce platform, posted Q3 2025 revenue of $9.3 billion. So no, AI subscriptions aren't threatening e-commerce anytime soon. But the growth trajectory is something Coupang would have recognized in its early days.
Who benefits beyond OpenAI
The 10.7% market share for Claude suggests Anthropic has found a foothold despite arriving later than ChatGPT. Whether that's stickiness from power users who prefer Claude's longer context windows, or just developers hedging their bets, is unclear from transaction data alone.
Gemini's 11% feels underwhelming given Google's distribution advantages in Korea. Samsung phones ship with Google services pre-installed, and Android dominates the market. That should give Gemini a native advantage it apparently hasn't capitalized on.
The data also points to something less flattering: the market is probably approaching saturation among early adopters. The 3,200% growth in transactions sounds impressive until you consider Korea's entire population is 51 million, and about 17 million were already using ChatGPT's mobile app (free and paid combined) by early 2025. Converting free users to paid accounts is a different challenge than acquiring new users entirely.
