The biggest complaint surrounding Siri has always been that it wasn’t smart enough. Soon, the complaint might be that it’s too expensive, as Apple has confirmed for the first time that its upcoming AI-powered Siri could come with a monthly fee for people who use it heavily. The company isn’t planning to put Siri behind a full paywall, but if you are constantly leaning on Apple’s revamped assistant, you may eventually have to pay for extra AI power through an upgraded iCloud+ subscription.
Apple is thinking beyond free
The basic version is still expected to remain free. But during Apple’s latest earnings call, CEO Tim Cook acknowledged that AI is expensive to run. Instead of charging everyone, Apple appears to be considering a model where power users can purchase additional AI capacity through higher iCloud+ tiers.
“We do believe there will be people that want to use [Siri AI] a lot,” Cook said, “and so we will have some kind of upgrade possibilities on iCloud+, where people can buy up the stack on iCloud+, and we’ll see how the pickup for that is. But we could not be more excited about where [Siri AI] is.”
Apple is borrowing a page from ChatGPT
Traditional Siri mostly relied on pre-programmed responses and relatively lightweight processing. But the new Siri is designed to understand conversations, remember personal context, complete more complicated tasks, and respond more naturally.
That is a lot more demanding than setting a kitchen timer. Every AI-generated response requires significantly more computing resources than the old Siri ever needed. Multiply that by hundreds of millions of users, and the electricity, servers, and specialized AI chips start adding up fast.
In fairness, Apple is not inventing anything new here. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and most major AI companies already follow this formula. You get a free tier with reasonable limits, and if you want faster responses, more requests, or access to the most powerful models, you pay a monthly subscription.
Apple is essentially applying that same logic to the iPhone. The difference is that Siri has always been bundled into the Apple experience. For years, buying an iPhone meant getting every Siri feature included. AI changes that equation because every complex request costs computing power, and computing power costs money.
Apple is still playing catch-up in the AI race
There’s another reason Apple may be looking for new revenue. The company has spent the last two years trying to catch up with competitors that got a head start in generative AI. Its upgraded Siri was delayed long enough to become one of Apple’s biggest recent headaches. The assistant finally debuted at this year’s WWDC and is currently available in beta, with a wider rollout expected alongside this fall’s new iPhones.
Apple has even leaned on Google’s Gemini models to help power some AI features while continuing to develop its own technology. So, alongside getting smarter, Siri is also getting significantly more expensive to build.
The iCloud+ strategy
Rather than launching another standalone subscription, Apple appears to be folding advanced AI into a service millions of customers already use. The company has gradually turned iCloud+ into much more than extra cloud storage, adding features like Private Relay, Hide My Email, and premium Home app capabilities.
If advanced Siri joins that list, Apple can market AI as another benefit of an existing subscription instead of asking customers to sign up for “Siri Pro.”
Sources: Axios, TechCrunch