Welcome to issue #1 of AI Money Brief. Three times a week we show you one real person making money with AI. You get the steps to copy them and the news that changes your costs.
In today's issue:
A dictation app built on one API that shows $11K a month
An AI phone call now costs about a dime
Claude's updated usage policy starts Nov 12
Character.AI files for bankruptcy, Disney buys assets for $20M
🔦 The Build
A founder built a speech-to-text app for his dad. It now shows about $11K in monthly recurring revenue.
Who: Kourosh, founder of Voicy.
What: a dictation app built on OpenAI's Whisper API. It started as a Chrome extension two years ago.
Who pays: he says most users are professionals. Roughly 20–30% are older or have disabilities.
Price: the monthly plan is usually $8.49. A lifetime plan is about $260.
Revenue: about $11K MRR and ~1,400 active subscriptions on the dashboard he showed. He says monthly cash runs $16–20K because lifetime deals land on top. We quote the lower number. Self-reported.
Whisper is a commodity. Anyone can call it. What he added is focus: he built for older and disabled users first, and learned what they needed on customer calls.
Our take: Don't compete on the model. Compete on who you serve. Dictation is crowded. A version built around one group's needs stands out. One caveat: most of his users are professionals, so the niche is the way in, not the whole business.
🛠️ The Playbook
Pick a group that's badly served. He spotted his by talking to users, not by using keyword tools.
Wrap one API. Start with the core feature on Whisper. Ship that before adding anything.
Go where they already are. He says his YouTube channel grew from about 1,000 to 12,000 subscribers in a month.
Give two ways to pay. A low monthly price, plus a one-time lifetime plan.
Let search compound. About 200 blog posts, in four or five languages.
🧰 The Stack
Tool | Job |
|---|---|
OpenAI Whisper API | Speech-to-text (the product) |
Cursor, Codex, ChatGPT | Writing the code |
Stripe | Payments (listed on the Starter Story stack) |
Framer | Website (~$200/mo) |
A VPS (Ionos) | Hosting (~$40/mo) |
The only costs he named are Framer and the VPS. Expect to pay per minute for Whisper as you grow.
⚡ Money Moves
Cheap models got a lot cheaper. Anthropic's Claude Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100K tokens. That's a tenth of Haiku 4.5's $1 and $5. OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna lists the same standard rates. If you run client automations, your margin may have just improved. Re-price before your client asks.
An AI phone call now costs about a dime. OpenAI's GPT-Live 1 voice layer is $0.05 a minute, billed per second. Backend model and tool costs are billed separately. OpenAI's cost guide works a 90-second call out to about $0.095 using example rates. That's the unit cost behind every "AI receptionist" offer.
Anthropic's updated usage policy starts Nov 12. The announcement says products that affect health, legal rights, finances or livelihood need a qualified human in the loop and must tell people AI was used. Anthropic says those requirements haven't changed. Selling AI services in those fields? Build the review step into your offer.
YouTube Music won't block AI tracks, but others limit them. YouTube Music added "Fully Gen AI," "Partly Gen AI" and "No Gen AI" labels. AI use alone doesn't make a track ineligible for monetization, per TechCrunch. TIDAL excludes fully AI-generated recordings from royalties. Deezer keeps detected AI music out of recommendations and editorial playlists. Label honestly.
Character.AI filed for bankruptcy. Disney is buying some assets for $20M, and the platform may shut down if no other bid comes in, TechCrunch reports. If your income lives on someone else's platform, keep an export path.
🧪 Try This
Price an AI receptionist before you pitch one.
Write a one-page brief for a made-up plumber: hours, services, service area, how to book.
Build a demo agent with OpenAI's voice API and that brief. Put the known facts up front so callers don't repeat themselves.
Make 10 test calls. Note the length of each one.
Multiply minutes by $0.05 and add backend costs, using the cost guide.
Price the retainer on bookings captured, not minutes. At about $0.10 a call, 300 calls a month costs you around $30 (an estimate; use your own test numbers).
Now you can quote a monthly price with real numbers behind it.
💬 Before you go
Making money with something you built with AI? Email [email protected] with what you built and what it earns. We might feature you, with your numbers labeled honestly.
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Income figures are reported by the builders and aren't guarantees. We label every number Verified, Reported or Self-reported. Prices are as listed by each company on the date of this issue. AI Money Brief is operated by TFS LLC.