Baidu makes ERNIE Bot free ahead of schedule

Background

For individual users, ERNIE Bot had been a partly paid product. Since November 2023, Baidu had charged RMB 59.90 a month for its ERNIE 4.0-based professional plan^[2]. Users could try the chatbot, but the stronger model sat behind a subscription.

What changed

On 16 March 2025, Baidu made ERNIE Bot free for individual users, moving ahead of its earlier plan to go fully free on 1 April 2025^[1]. The change was not limited to an older model: users could reach ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1 at no charge on the official website, yiyan.baidu.com^[1]. So the free tier was the same release that introduced the company's newest general model and its first reasoning model to consumers.

The schedule matters. A company announcing a date and then beating it is a small thing operationally, but it tells users that the free version is the current product rather than a leftover. Anyone who had been paying for the professional plan could move to the free service and keep using the newer models.

The two models

ERNIE 4.5 is the general-purpose model of the release. Baidu said it outperformed GPT-4.5 in multiple benchmarks while being priced at just 1% of GPT-4.5^[1]. Benchmark comparisons of this kind are the company's own claims about its model, and they describe test scores rather than everyday use; what they indicate is that Baidu positioned ERNIE 4.5 as competitive with the leading Western general models rather than as a cheaper, weaker alternative.

ERNIE X1 is a reasoning model. Reasoning models are trained to work through a problem in explicit intermediate steps before giving an answer — spending more computation at the moment of answering, which helps on mathematics, coding and multi-step questions and costs more to run. Baidu said ERNIE X1 delivered performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price^[1]. DeepSeek R1 is the open reasoning model that made step-by-step reasoning widely accessible, and naming it as the reference point places ERNIE X1 in the same class while making cost the differentiator.

The API side

The free consumer product came alongside aggressive API pricing. On its Qianfan platform, Baidu set API input prices for ERNIE 4.5 starting as low as RMB 0.004 per thousand tokens^[1]. A token is the unit models read and write — roughly a word fragment in English, or a character or two in Chinese — so per-thousand-token prices set what it costs a developer to build an application on top of a model. Input pricing covers the text sent to the model, distinguishing it from output pricing, which is normally higher.

Putting a flagship model behind a free web interface and simultaneously pricing its API near the bottom of the market is a single strategy seen from two sides. The free chatbot brings in users; the low API price brings in developers who would otherwise default to a rival's model.

Aftermath

Decrypt notes that Baidu dropped its paid chatbot subscription model in April 2025^[3], completing the shift that the March announcement had begun. The paid professional plan that had existed since November 2023 was gone as a consumer offering.

Why it matters

A leading Chinese model provider withdrawing its consumer subscription changes what users expect. Once a capable chatbot is free at the flagship level, a paid tier has to offer something clearly different — more usage, enterprise features, or a different product — rather than simply access to the best model.

The pricing claims also pull the market's attention to cost per unit of capability. Saying a model matches a rival at half the price, or beats another at 1% of the price, shifts the comparison from raw scores to what a given level of performance costs. For developers choosing a model to build on, and for companies deciding whether to pay for a subscription, those two numbers — benchmark score and price per token — are what the decision increasingly turns on.