Want to know if a product is actually growing? Don’t look at downloads. Look at credit card data.
That’s exactly what TechCrunch did — and the results are pretty striking.
Follow the money
Analytics firm Indagari tracks billions of anonymized credit card transactions from roughly 28 million US consumers. Their data shows Claude’s paying user base has grown about 75 percent since January 2026. Month over month, consistently up.
Here’s what makes it interesting: the growth didn’t flatten after the March spike — when the Pentagon refusal controversy pushed Claude into headlines everywhere. It just kept climbing.
The conversion rate that matters
13 percent of Anthropic users pay for a subscription. That might not sound like a lot in isolation, but it leads the field. Anthropic is converting free users into paying customers better than anyone else right now.
DataCamp tells the same story
DataCamp has over 20 million users. On their platform, ‘Claude’ is now the most searched term — ahead of ‘AI’ itself. Claude courses are booked 3x more often than ChatGPT courses among self-directed learners. And demand for Claude courses shot up 18x in the last 30 days.
These aren’t abstract benchmark comparisons. These are real people spending real money to learn how to use Claude.
ChatGPT loses ground for the first time
On the other side of the equation: ChatGPT’s market share slipped below 50 percent for the first time, according to TechCrunch reporting from mid-June. Now the picture is getting clearer.
ChatGPT is still the dominant player by a wide margin in absolute numbers. But the trendline has shifted direction for the first time.
My take
What strikes me most about these numbers: they’re not survey data or app store rankings. They’re credit card transactions. You can’t get much harder evidence than that.
And they reveal something beyond hype. Claude isn’t growing because of a viral moment or a marketing push. People try it, like it, and pay for it. That’s the most fundamental kind of growth there is.
Both companies are preparing for IPOs right now. For Anthropic, these numbers are gold. For OpenAI, they’re a warning: being the market leader isn’t a permanent condition.
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