The Browser Company — the scrappy New York startup behind the cult-fave Arc browser — quietly moved from experiment to experiment this year. Its newest experiment, Dia, is an AI-first browser that treats your open tabs like a conversation you can have with a helpful intern. And now, barely out of beta, Dia has a paid level: Dia Pro, $20 a month for “unlimited” access to the browser’s chat and skills features.

Dia’s marquee trick is a chat interface that can pull context from the tabs you already have open. Ask it to summarize a long thread, compare a stack of hotel pages, or draft an email using the product pages you’ve left open — it’s built to reduce the cut-and-paste friction that makes today’s browsing feel like busywork. Dia Pro, according to the company, removes limits on that chat feature: pay $20 and you don’t have to worry about bumping into quotas while you lean on the assistant all day. Free users keep the base AI features — including skills (tiny automations you can build) and the chatbot — but may see usage caps if they rely on the assistant heavily. The Browser Company hasn’t published a detailed quota chart yet.

That vagueness is intentional, it sounds like. CEO Josh Miller has been blunt: the company wants Dia to stay “free for those who use the A.I. tool only a few times a week,” while heavy users should pay. He’s also teased a broad pricing ladder that could include modest $5 tiers and enterprise or power-user plans that scale into the hundreds per month. The practical effect is a freemium model that prizes occasional users but funnels frequent, high-value usage behind paywalls.

If you’ve been watching browsers in 2025, Dia’s timing isn’t random. Big incumbents are folding AI into the UI: Microsoft has been testing a “Copilot Mode” in Edge that can read multiple tabs to help you compare options or book things for you, while Google has also been moving AI into Chrome in various ways. At the same time, search-first AI companies like Perplexity launched Comet, an AI browser that brings the startup’s summarization and automation chops into a Chromium shell. And there are persistent leaks suggesting OpenAI itself is close to shipping a browser product. The upshot: everyone is betting the browser is the strategic front line for AI.

Dia’s bet is a two-part one. First, users will prefer an assistant that lives inside the browser and understands the tabs you’re already using. Second, that power users — researchers, reporters, product people, sales teams — will pay for the convenience of frictionless AI in their workflow. That’s a different axis from ad-supported search and a direct attempt to build recurring revenue in a market where incumbents still dominate distribution.

Risks and friction points

Two immediate questions hover over the rollout.

Privacy and data use. A browser that “reads” your tabs to answer questions is necessarily ingesting a lot of context about your browsing. The Browser Company emphasizes opt-ins (like a History toggle that gives the assistant seven days of context), but for widespread trust, it will need clear, granular policies and technical boundaries that reassure users — especially those who already use password managers, work accounts, and sensitive web apps inside the same browser.

Subscription fatigue. Consumers already choose between a handful of paid AIs, streaming apps, VPNs, and pro tools. Asking for $20/month for browser AI — before the limits for free users are clear — risks being another line item people will cut in a recession or when they don’t perceive daily value. That said, if Dia genuinely saves a busy professional hours a week, $20 will quickly be perceived as a bargain.

Where Dia fits in the evolving browser war

Think of Dia as a specialist: it wants to be the browser for people whose work benefits from constant short-form automation and summarization. Edge and Chrome are moving toward broad AI features that nudge millions of regular users; Perplexity’s Comet and other startups are targeting people who want better answers than Google offers. OpenAI, if it ships a browser, would add another heavyweight with a plug-and-play ChatGPT ecosystem. Dia’s defense is product clarity and the artisanal cred of The Browser Company team — they designed Arc to be opinionated, and appearance matters when you’re selling a new workflow to enthusiasts.

What to watch next

• Exact free-tier limits. The company promised casual users will stay free; when it defines the cutoff, adoption and public reaction will follow. The Verge
• New tiers and bundles. Miller suggested more price points; expect a lower-priced plan for light users and an enterprise bundle for teams.
• Privacy tooling. Will Dia ship clear controls for what the assistant can read, and enterprise-grade safeguards for work profiles?
• How competitors respond. Microsoft, Google, Perplexity, and OpenAI aren’t standing still — expect feature parity and pricing experiments across the board.

Dia’s $20 Pro plan is less a surprise than a signal: AI browsers are moving from labs to business models. The Browser Company is wagering that one part design sensibility and one part assistant-as-interface can carve a sustainable niche — if it gets privacy, pricing, and product polishing right. For people who live in tabs and value time more than wallets, the question now is whether Dia’s chat is a superpower or an expensive novelty. The answer is coming — likely behind a paywall for the heaviest users.