Most of you probably know about Econet AI already. It’s a new Econet company that’s just focused on AI and the group is taking this effort pretty seriously. The company has it’s own CEO (Navdeep Kapur) and has publicly been on a recruitment drive for a 100 AI engineers.
You can read about Econet AI the company on the website dedicated to it here econetai.co.zw. I’ve been confused about the strategy and direction of this new company (too many B2B products where I assumed Econet would leverage its B2C strengths but that’s a story for another day) so it was quite pleasant to see them introduce a consumer product.
This week, the company introduced ecoAI Token, an AI aggregator.
You use it to chat with the top AI models: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Mistral. It’s not free. You use your airtime or EcoCash to pay for tokens.
Econet AI is selling tokens like Econet the network sells data bundles: 10 cents a day, 70 cents a week, $3 a month.
The onboarding to start using ecoAI is incredibly easy and straightforward. You enter your Econet number, you receive an OTP and you’re in! The company already has your information from the network side. In fact it’s so easy it made me uneasy.
Once you’re in, you select the package (bundle? I’ll use this bundle language for ease but it’s not their language) you want, confirm your EcoCash payment and you’re done. Their FAQ says eligible users can get a free tier, but doesn’t say how.
Once you’ve paid, you can chat with the AI models and use up your tokens. For example, I bought the 10 cents daily bundle and got 5000 tokens. I started what’s clearly an expensive conversation, comparing responses from the different AIs available, and my 5000 tokens were gone in 2 messages. So, wrong bundle for me.
When you run out, you can just top up with another AI bundle, just like data bundles.
If you use this frequently it will be clear how many tokens you need for your work. Can’t say right now if ecoAI is more expensive or cheaper than the competition. Actually I can. Without a free tier, it automatically costs more. Competing AI aggregators like Poe have a free tier.
But ecoAI is not just competing with other AI aggregators, there’s the frontier models themselves. Why would I use ecoAi when I can just use Gemini, Claude or ChatGPT directly? All the frontier models have free tiers, some of them offering unlimited text chats.
OpenAI, for example, now offers free users unlimited text chats with GPT-5.6 Luna, a model the company says produces 62% fewer factual errors than the GPT‑5.5 it replaces. Why would I buy the GPT 5.5 bundles that ecoAI is selling?
In addition, ecoAI doesn’t have the latest models. Their Claude only goes up to the 4.x versions, which is not the best. Why would I pay to access an older model when I can pay Anthropic directly to access the latest and more powerful ones like Fable 5 and Opus 5? Especially considering both Claude and ChatGPT let me fine-tune how much thinking the model does, a feature ecoAI just doesn’t have. Controlling this thinking effort impacts price, which would make using ChatGPT and Claude directly potentially cheaper.
So if ecoAI is not cheaper, then the utility is elsewhere? The quick switching between models? I’m already a heavy user of ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Switching between them is just a tab click away, so switching models is definitely not a problem.
If it’s not the model switching, then maybe the payments ease? Is the micro-payment the innovation here? While I can already pay for Claude using my EcoCash Virtual Mastercard I can’t pay for for just 10 cents of it’s brain. Maybe there are lots of Zimbabweans who will find paying 10 cents at a time is more practical than forking $20 at once? But aren’t these people catered for by the leading models’ free tiers? ChaptGPT has unlimited, Claude resets every few hours, and Poe resets every 24 hours, making the ecoAI’s daily bundle redundant.
Or I just don’t get it.
Or maybe they’re going zero rate this so Econet customers can use it without buying data bundles?
Anyway, ‘why use this’ aside, there’s the issue of the product experience itself. I loved the payment and ease of login. The presentation of the product could improve but it is usable and will improve. There has been some complaints that it’s vibe coded as if vibe coding, itself is a bad thing.
I think as long as the person prompting is taking care to create a great product, whether it’s vibe coded or not doesn’t matter. Unless the argument is there’s no way to produce a good vibe coded product. But anyone who says this clearly hasn’t been vibe coding, or is just a sour developer struggling to find themselves in these new times.
It’s a new product and I think it will improve. Right now, I personally have no need for it. Keen to hear the use cases you are seeing. Please do comment.
The post Econet launches ecoAI Token, taking the Data Bundles concept to AI appeared first on Techzim.
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