A common price.
Unequal hours.

An AI subscription can carry the same dollar price across much of the world. But a dollar asks for a different amount of work in every economy.

Intelligence Hours makes that difference legible. It asks a concrete question: how many hours of gross minimum-wage work does one month of a paid AI subscription cost?

A small number with a clear meaning.

Like familiar international price comparisons, this index starts with something recognizable. It translates a subscription price into time, a unit people already understand. Its ambition is to become a durable reference for the affordability of paid AI access.

The name is deliberately memorable. The measure is deliberately narrower: it does not quantify intelligence, model performance, productivity, human worth, or the replacement of labor. Free AI services also exist.

Built to be questioned.

A useful index should let readers reproduce its result. We publish the price, wage, exchange rate, jurisdiction, source and date behind each number. We preserve revisions and never fill historical gaps with invented observations.

The initial benchmark uses the median of three widely recognizable monthly plans: ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro and Google AI Pro. The basket is versioned so tomorrow’s product changes do not silently rewrite yesterday’s measure.

Created by Kwangseob Ahn, at INLEVEL9.

Kwangseob Ahn is an adjunct professor in the School of Business at Sejong University in the Republic of Korea, where he teaches business data management, business analytics and statistical approaches to data-informed decision making. He has more than 15 years of experience in the IT industry and is the founder and principal consultant of INLEVEL9, a boutique consulting firm.

INLEVEL9 profile · LinkedIn · Read the research paper

Kwangseob Ahn (안광섭), also known as Oswarld, created Intelligence Hours at INLEVEL9. These names refer to the same person. It began with a simple observation: AI subscription prices are increasingly similar across borders, while the wages people earn to pay for them remain very different.

The index turns that gap into a number anyone can read: the hours of work needed to afford a month of paid AI. The aim is to give readers, journalists and researchers a lasting reference for discussing access to AI, as familiar and easy to compare as other international price indexes.

This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with the OECD or the AI providers listed here. The current release is a research preview while country and regional wage coverage is verified.

Questions, contributions and citations.

For questions about the index, corrections, additional official wage or price sources, research collaboration, or citation requests, email about@intelligence-hours.org. When suggesting a data update, include the official source URL, jurisdiction, covered population and effective date.

When citing a result, identify Intelligence Hours, the country and wage jurisdiction, the observation date, and the basket or individual plan. Link to the result and its sources so readers can reproduce the comparison. Contact us for publication enquiries or help interpreting a particular result.