The number of calls is rising—Tencent Buddy Family will be repriced.
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Author | Huang Yu
After more than three months since Tencent's WorkBuddy was launched, many domestic users’ use of AI products has shifted from light Q&A to mainly long-context, multi-round reasoning, automated tasks, file reading/writing, and cross-application collaboration, which has rapidly increased resource consumption on the WorkBuddy platform.
Against this backdrop, Tencent began upgrading the subscription for personal versions of products like WorkBuddy in China. Starting July 1, the subscription model for these products will expand from “free trial version + professional version” to a four-tier system: free trial version, standard version, advanced version, and flagship version.
Among them, the original professional version will be upgraded to the standard version, and the monthly fee will increase from 58 yuan to 99 yuan; meanwhile, a 199 yuan/month advanced version and a 999 yuan/month flagship version are newly added, with different tiers opening up model capabilities, automated task quantities, cloud storage space, and points limits.
From a pricing strategy perspective, the price increase for the WorkBuddy standard version is not just a simple rise, but also leaves users ample choice. For the standard version, a monthly subscription can be discounted to 70 yuan/month (30% off), and an annual subscription is cheaper than before, decreasing from 696 yuan/year to 672 yuan/year.
Additionally, after using the 4,000 points granted each month in the original professional version, users have to purchase extra add-on packages to continue using, at a fee of 38 yuan/1,000 points.
Now the advanced and flagship versions clearly offer deeper users more favorable choices. However, in the new subscription scheme, the price for extra add-on packages is 50 yuan/1,000 points.
It is worth mentioning that WorkBuddy has also added 50G cloud storage benefits for all users.
According to WallstreetCN, WorkBuddy's cloud drive capability is supported by Tencent’s newly launched Tencent Cloud Drive. Currently, documents and files in WorkBuddy’s multi-user collaboration projects are now stored in Tencent Cloud Drive, and individual items uploaded to the cloud are also handled by Tencent Cloud Drive.
In the future, not only WorkBuddy, but also Tencent Docs, LeXiang, IMA and other products will gradually access Tencent Cloud Drive, enabling cross-application data storage.
This adjustment to WorkBuddy’s paid packages can be seen as Tencent accelerating the commercialization of AI products. Unlike traditional internet products with nearly zero marginal cost, AI products must consider revenue growth and cost from day one.
WallstreetCN understands that since this year, as desktop Agent capabilities have rapidly spread, products like WorkBuddy and CodeBuddy have seen a significant increase in usage. In just three months after launch, per capita token consumption on the WorkBuddy platform grew by more than 10 times.
Recently at a financial report meeting, Tencent president Liu Chiping said the commercialization of AI products for individual users is relatively difficult. At the same time, unlike traditional internet products, AI services cannot be infinitely expanded at extremely low marginal costs; every model call and service delivery incurs real costs.
Therefore, the industry can no longer simply apply the logic of “maximizing scale and DAU” from the internet era. In Liu Chiping’s view, identifying high-value scenarios is at least as important as user scale, if not more so—a new consideration for Tencent in product deployment and model synergy design.
Tang Daosheng, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent Group and CEO of Cloud and Smart Industries Group, pointed out that WorkBuddy has a clear business model in enterprise scenarios, and likened WorkBuddy to Tencent Meeting a few years ago: it has both ToC and ToB attributes. Next, Tencent will maximize WorkBuddy’s C2B capability to build a sustainable service system.
Looking from a longer-term perspective, this pricing upgrade also reflects changes in Tencent’s phase assessment of AI business.
In recent years, the core issue in large model competition was who had stronger models and more user entrances; but after entering 2026, a real question faces all vendors—how can AI truly achieve sustainable revenue.
However, Tang Daosheng recently mentioned that intelligent agents like WorkBuddy are still in the strategic investment phase, and the company has not set commercialization targets for the team.
Now Tencent continues to offer free trials, but has begun using price tiers to filter true high-frequency needs: allowing light users low-barrier entry, letting frequent users purchase more productivity quotas, and meanwhile forming new value loops through storage, collaboration, and Agent capabilities.
As Agent products reach deeper usage, the logic of using free versions to attract new users will inevitably give way to tiered charges based on call frequency, task complexity, storage, and collaboration capabilities.
This adjustment to WorkBuddy’s subscription packages is essentially Tencent rebuilding a more sustainable charging model for AI productivity products.
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