"Pass the cost onto the end user" — Phrase of the Week
Doubao starts charging customers
Our phrase of the week is: “pass the cost onto the end user” (羊毛出在羊身上 yáng máo chū zài yáng shēn shang)
Context
On May 4, a statement appeared on Doubao’s (豆包) App Store page.
ByteDance’s flagship AI assistant, which is the most widely used in the country, announced it had added a paid subscription to its until-now free service.
There are three pricing tiers in Daobao’s premium offering: a standard plan at 68 yuan a month, an enhanced plan at 200 yuan, and a professional plan at 500 yuan.
In media discussions about the story this has raised a question for many in China: should AI be free?
Apps like Doubao are expensive to build and run. By March 2026, Doubao’s daily usage had hit 120 trillion tokens (the “raw material” AI runs on). This is equivalent to a doubling in usage in just three months, with monthly computing costs approaching one billion yuan.
And as costs rise, the makers of AI products like ByteDance have a choice:
One model is like Seedance, where early adopters enjoy a high-quality experience that inevitably degrades as the user base swells. To manage overhead, it quietly throttles resources, offering new users fewer tokens for the same price, while the response gets worse the more the user tries.The inevitable consequence? A growing chorus of users complaining that the “AI is getting stupider.”
The other is to aggressively pivot toward monetization to pass the cost. Some are experimenting with embedding ads directly into AI outputs—the classic “indirect monetization” play where the advertiser foots the bill. Others are moving toward straight-up subscription models, where they pass the cost directly onto the end user.
一种是SeeDance这样的，初期好用，用的人多了，后来的用户花同样的钱买到的Token越少，抽卡次数越多，输出质量越拉，“AI越来越难用”；一种是探索AI商业化，让用户来承担Token成本，比如在AI结果中塞广告，羊毛出在猪身上，再比如AI收费，羊毛出在羊身上。
And with that, we have our Sinica Phrase of the Week.
What it means
“Pass the cost onto the end user” is our translation of a Chinese colloquial expression which translated directly is: “the wool comes from the sheep’s own back” (羊毛出在羊身上).
The imagery is that wool appears to grow freely on a sheep’s back. But from the sheep’s perspective, one cannot shear the wool, hand it back to the sheep and call it a gift. Whatever is offered has already come from them.
The earliest written record of the phrase appears in On Hearing That Mother Wang Has Ordered a Small Memorial Ceremony (闻王妈妈定做小祥功德作二首), a pair of poems by the Song Dynasty monk Daoji (释道济), better known by his nickname Ji Gong (济公). Ji Gong (1130-1209) was a Chan Buddhist monk celebrated in Chinese folklore as an eccentric healer who flouted monastic rules while championing the poor.
The relevant lines read:
“Two hundred coins for five dishes of food. So the wool comes from the sheep’s own back.”
二百衬钱五味食，羊毛出在羊身上。
The context of the poem is a humble street vendor is holding a memorial ceremony for her late husband. When Ji Gong and a friend encounter her, they wonder how someone of such modest means could afford such a lavish occasion.
Ji Gong concludes she can hold the ceremony because she is the one paying for it. She could have five dishes because she paid 200 coins out of her own pocket. The wool comes from the sheep’s own back.
In modern Chinese, the phrase is common in business. It’s usually translated as “you’re paying for it one way or another.” In other words, any apparent benefit or discount has already been baked into the price the recipient pays for and nothing is truly free.
In recent years, a more elaborate variation of the phrase has appeared: “the wool comes from the sheep, but it’s the pig that foots the bill” (羊毛出在猪身上). This is a description of the platform economy, where users enjoy free services subsidised by advertisers or investors: the sheep grazes for free; the pig pays.
China’s AI industry has been running on exactly that model. Free services have so far been bankrolled by investors and advertising. But those two models are now diverging. Either the pig (investors) keeps keep footing the bill with more investment. Or the cost is passed onto the sheep (the user) directly.
Doubao has just made its choice. Which is why in this context we translate “the wool comes from the sheep’s own back” as “pass the cost onto the end user.”
Andrew Methven is the author of RealTime Mandarin, a resource which helps you bridge the gap to real-world fluency in Mandarin, stay informed about China, and communicate with confidence—all through weekly immersion in real news. Subscribe for free here.
