I think he means something like WhatsApp, which was 1 dollar per year in the beginning. But then again their model wouldn't work here either, because you could gift a 1 year membership to someone else. Given how much more valuable those bots are than 1 dollar per year, it would mean nothing to gift it to large amounts of people.

Similarly if you enforce it for everyone to pay for themselves, there would immediately be large parts of the world population that wouldn't be able to pay for it. Note that afford and be able to pay isn't the same thing. Which would turn it into the same western echo chamber they basically want it to be.