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A Lagos makeup studio runs on ChatGPT's free tier
Nureeyah Ogunmuyiwa told Rest of World that ChatGPT wrote her first job description and now does her restock pricing. She has never paid for it, and she puts AI at roughly 5% of her business growth.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Rest of World visited workers across Asia and Africa who use AI in their daily work, reporting on what they hand over to a chatbot and what they keep for themselves.
- Nureeyah Ogunmuyiwa, a 24-year-old makeup artist in Lagos, asked ChatGPT for help hiring her first employee and got a full hiring plan, interview questions and a candidate checklist within minutes.
- The chatbot also works as her social media manager, writing captions, suggesting hashtags and recommending content ideas that she says have brought in new customers.
- She has never paid for ChatGPT or for Anthropic's Claude, telling Rest of World that the free version of each does what she needs it to do.
- Nearly half of Nigeria's population is now online, most of them over smartphones, and she reaches the chatbots from her phone alongside WhatsApp Business and Instagram.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint The free tier here is running a small company's back office. She has never paid for it.
- decision Anyone drawing a free-to-paid line for solo operators has to decide whether better text is worth money to someone who will rewrite the text herself, because the upgrade she names is image work.
- cost A challenger chatbot pays its switching cost up front in re-teaching the business context, while a user like her stays on the free tier.
- exposure Forecasts that count on consumer subscriptions in these markets run into the user's own accounting, and a monthly price has to look cheap against the growth she credits to AI.
Ogunmuyiwa has organised her chats under labels, including one called "Glam by Ree" after the business and another called "return to corporate" for her professional plans [14]. She started in a customer support job at a Lagos logistics startup, using ChatGPT to rewrite emails so they sounded more empathetic to customers and more professional to colleagues, and she kept the habit when she left in 2024 to run the makeup business full time [7][8].
She has not paid OpenAI or Anthropic anything, and Rest of World reports that the free version serves her purpose [17]. "I have invested my time but not my money," she said. "And I'm getting a great return." [18]
When she decided to hire her first employee earlier this year, she did not know how to write a job description or what questions to ask in an interview [4]. The chatbot came back with interview questions and a checklist for evaluating candidates [5]. It also does the pricing maths she could do herself, slower, working out restock prices from costs and margins [11]. "It saves me from punching each product in the calculator and then trying to do the mental work of arriving at a profitable price point," she said [12].
Of the seven jobs named in her account, six come back as words or numbers and one comes back as a picture [25]. She generated mood boards for the new rented studio after moving the business out of her dining room, and shared them with the carpenters and electricians [15]. The paid version she can imagine buying is one for images and mood boards [19].
A friend recommended Anthropic's Claude earlier this year and she was reluctant, expecting to teach a second chatbot everything about her business from scratch. She uses both now and highly favours ChatGPT [16].
Nearly half of Nigeria's population has internet access, most of it over smartphones [23]. This is one worker's account out of the group Rest of World visited across Asia and Africa, and the share of growth she gives to AI is her own estimate [1][20].
The split that matters on a free tier is between the tasks a user could produce herself, badly and slowly, and the ones she could not produce at all. The first kind competes with hours she already treats as free. Six of Ogunmuyiwa's seven tasks sit there [25].
She has also stopped using AI once already, on purpose, because the dependence worried her [24].
What to watch
- Whether the rest of Rest of World's Asia and Africa profiles include anyone paying for a subscription.
- Where OpenAI sets image generation limits on the free tier, since images are the one feature she named as worth money.
- Whether Ogunmuyiwa's deliberate pause from AI repeats, and what she moved back to doing by hand.