Think about the last few apps you downloaded. Chances are, at least one of them was designed to get you to spend more money. Another subscription. Another delivery. Another upgrade you did not really need.
For two decades, that has been the Silicon Valley playbook. Build something sticky, make it convenient, and watch the money flow in.
But a quieter, more interesting idea is starting to gain ground. What if the real opportunity is not in getting people to open their wallets wider, but in helping them keep more of what is already there?
What Did Andrew Yang Say?
Andrew Yang, the entrepreneur and former US presidential candidate, has been living this thesis rather than just talking about it. In 2025, he launched Noble Mobile, a budget phone carrier built on a simple observation: most people are overpaying for data plans they do not fully use.
The company pays customers back if they use less than a certain amount of data each month. Earlier this year, Noble Mobile acquired Helium Mobile, another affordable carrier, doubling down on the same idea.
When asked by TechCrunch what inspired the venture, Yang pointed directly to Mark Cuban. He looked at what Cuban was doing in pharmaceuticals and asked himself, what else in American life could be built on the same principle? What else are people systematically overpaying for?
It is a small question with a very large answer.
India Has Been Living This Idea
Long before this became a talking point in American tech circles, India was quietly building some of its most consequential companies around exactly this principle.
Reliance Jio did not just launch a telecom network. It blew up the price of mobile internet so completely that India went from being one of the most expensive data markets in the world to one of the cheapest. Hundreds of millions of people came online not because they suddenly got richer, but because the cost of entry collapsed.
UPI made digital payments nearly free, for consumers and small merchants alike. Aadhaar and the broader India Stack reduced the cost of verifying identity and accessing financial services, two things that had historically kept ordinary Indians on the wrong side of the formal economy.
Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder of Infosys who architected much of this infrastructure, has long described it in similar terms, remove friction, lower cost, reach everyone. It is not a glamorous idea. But it is a powerful one.
India’s biggest breakthroughs have rarely come from selling people something new. They have come from making something necessary more affordable.
The Man Who Proved It In Healthcare
Yang drew his inspiration from Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur who looked at America’s pharmaceutical industry and asked, why do drugs cost this much?
His answer was Cost Plus Drugs, a pharmacy company built on radical transparency. It sells medicines at the actual cost of manufacturing, adds a flat 15 percent markup, and charges small dispensing and shipping fees. No hidden pricing. No opaque middlemen. Just cost, plus a margin you can actually see.
The idea has caught on in a serious way. In April 2026, health insurer Humana announced a partnership with Cost Plus Drugs, integrating its technology and transparent pricing into Humana’s CenterWell pharmacy network to lower prescription costs for employers and their workers.
The business logic is almost insultingly simple. Instead of squeezing customers for more, give some of the margin back to them. Build loyalty through genuine value, not habit or convenience.
Why Affordability Is Actually the Bigger Business
Jeff Bezos understood this instinctively when he built Amazon.
Lower prices bring in more customers. More customers create scale. Scale drives costs down further. And the cycle keeps going.
It is not charity. It is compounding. The businesses that make essential things cheaper tend to grow larger than the ones that make optional things more desirable, because essential things have far more potential users.
India’s telecom revolution proved this on a national scale. Cheap internet did not just grow Jio’s subscriber base. It grew the entire digital economy around it, creating markets for businesses that could not have existed before.
Healthcare, education, insurance, housing, legal services. Millions of Indian households still find all of these things painfully expensive, and often simply out of reach. The entrepreneurs who find a way into those problems are not just building businesses. They are expanding the size of the economy itself.
AI Might Accelerate Everything
This is where artificial intelligence enters the story, not as the goal, but as a tool.
Sam Altman of OpenAI has argued that AI will dramatically lower the cost of intelligence itself, of knowledge, advice, analysis, expertise. Jensen Huang of Nvidia has made a similar point about computing and productivity. If that happens, the downstream effects could be significant.
An AI tutor that makes quality education affordable to a child in a small town. A diagnostic platform that reduces what a patient pays to understand their own health. A legal tool that lets a small business owner access professional advice without a professional’s fees.
None of these are glamorous ideas. But each of them addresses something real, a cost that real people actually feel every month.
India Has a Head Start
Several Indian founders have been thinking along these lines for years.
Sridhar Vembu, who co-founded Zoho and famously relocated the company’s operations to rural Tamil Nadu, has consistently argued that technology’s highest purpose is not to create new consumption but to make productive work more accessible and affordable.
He has lived that belief in ways both personal and institutional, building a bootstrapped, billion-dollar software company by charging prices that small and mid-sized businesses could actually afford.
Bhavish Aggarwal has positioned Ola Electric not just as a vehicle company but as a way to reduce what people spend on getting around over time. The upfront cost of an electric vehicle is higher. The lifetime cost of fuel and maintenance is lower. That is an affordability argument dressed in green language.
And then there is ONDC, the Open Network for Digital Commerce, a government-backed initiative that aims to do for e-commerce what UPI did for payments. By building an open, interoperable network instead of letting a few large platforms control access and charge steep commissions, it tries to lower the cost of buying and selling online for consumers and small merchants alike.
The Pattern Is Clearer Than It Looks
Yang’s actions and the broader global conversation they represent matter less because of who he is and more because of what they point at, something India has quietly been demonstrating for years.
The companies that help people spend less on the things they cannot live without do not always get the same breathless coverage as the ones chasing the next premium segment. But they tend to build something more durable: genuine economic value for a very large number of people.
India’s next generation of breakthrough companies may not emerge from convincing households to want more.
They may emerge from helping households breathe a little easier with what they already have. That is not a consolation prize. That might be the biggest opportunity on the table.
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
India’s biggest technology successes have rarely come from creating new desires. They have come from making essentials more accessible. From Jio’s cheap internet to UPI’s nearly frictionless payments, affordability has often been India’s competitive advantage.
As AI reshapes industries, entrepreneurs have an opportunity to solve problems that matter to ordinary households. Businesses that lower the cost of healthcare, education, mobility and financial services may not only create wealth, but also expand economic opportunity for millions.
Also Read: What FSSAI’s Notices To KFC, Nestle And Flipkart Say About The Business of Trust
