Joshua Browder of Do Not Pay Announces Plans To Expand Company in The UK

“I am still a really big believer in the UK and the next generation [of entrepreneurs]” – Joshua Browder

 

Yesterday, TechRound sat down with DoNotPay Founder Joshua Browder to talk about the company, where they plan to expand and how he feels about the AI race between OpenAI and DeepSeek.

 

Tell us about DoNotPay. What led you to start the business?

 

“DoNotPay is an AI consumer champion. The easy way to explain it to people from the UK is that it’s like an AI money saving expert. It fights for consumer rights. I think the first generation of internet companies told you what to do in regards to consumer rights, and the second generation, which we’re in now, actually does it for you.

“So across over 200 areas of fighting big companies and governments, we’ve automated a lot of different processes.

“The way I got started is that when I was a secondary school student, I got a lot of parking tickets, and I couldn’t afford to pay them. I started to become an expert in getting out of parking tickets with the Road Traffic Act in the UK, and a rumour spread amongst my family and friends that I could do the same for them. I thought it would be a really cool side project to have an app that you put in all your details, you select a defence, and it sends it off to the council.

“I went from about five to 10 cases to 10s of 1000s of cases in a matter of weeks. Fast forward 8 years, and I’m still doing the exact same thing. The company has grown a lot. We’re very lucky that it’s now worth a quarter of a billion dollars, and we have millions of users, and it’s actually a profitable business.”

 

 

What is the current success rate of the platform?

 

“Most of it is almost 100% successful. So for example, cancelling subscriptions, getting refunds, really is where these big companies make you jump through all these hoops. They’re not really very consumer friendly in America. So for example, you have to send a signed letter to cancel your gym membership, and that’s a good job for AI. [DoNotPay] generates the letter, signs on your behalf, and sometimes it can even fax it.

“So the original use case of parking tickets was only about 60% successful, but now it’s on average, I would say 90%.”

 

 

Are there other areas you think AI could be used more to help people battle outdated systems?

 

“Yes, so we’ve had a transformation with our business in terms of the product and AI. So when it started, it was really template based, but now there’s only so much you can do with templates.

“That really limited our business for a while, but AI has made so many more things possible. So for example, we now do AI Bill negotiation where we have a robot log into someone’s utility account and start chatting with the agent to negotiate a consumer’s refund. We’re now doing 1000s of these every week. And what’s interesting is, at least at the beginning, the big companies use AI and we use AI, so sometimes it’s actually literally just 2 AIs negotiating.”

 

What do you say to those who argue that AI should not be used to replace human jobs?

 

I joke that there’s not a solicitor who will get out of bed to help you with the £50 refund. And so people are really being taken advantage of, and these big companies know that.

I think we have this problem in society of concentrated benefit but spread out harm. What I mean by that is that if a company in the UK can charge a million people five pounds, they make 5 million pounds, but the person being charged five pounds obviously doesn’t have the power or time to fight back something so small.

I really think we have to fight fire with fire, and that’s the only way we can empower people, especially with these small charges.”

 

What do you think of the AI race between Silicon Valley and now DeepSeek?

 

“It’s a race to the bottom in terms of pricing for the leading AI model, The DeepSeek model is 214x cheaper for us than the GPT-4 model in January of 2023, so we have the same technology a year later that is 200x cheaper.

“Over the past few weeks, we’ve actually switched a lot of our AI to DeepSeek. There’s a way to do it so that they don’t actually have access to your data. You can post an open source version of the model on something called Ollama, which means that there’s no privacy concerns. And this has allowed us to build use cases that previously weren’t possible.

“With AI, you want it constantly listening to things and feeding your data. But that’s expensive if costs $2 per million characters. This kind of cost reduction has allowed us to feed in much more data. GPT-4o today costs $2.50 per million tokens for us. And DeepSeek costs 14 cents, so that’s 18 times cheaper. GPT reduced their price a lot in the past year, so it’s 18x cheaper than the reduced price and 214x cheaper than the original price.”

 

Do you plan to launch DoNotPay in any other markets? If so, which?

 

“We’ve kept a lot of products that still work in the UK. The UK is very close to my heart, and so we’re doubling down on it. We want to bring all the great products that worked in the US to the UK. I really am still a big believer In the UK and the next generation [of entrepreneurs].”

What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs?

 

“Just get started. And what I mean by that is, I have a lot of friends who say, oh, I need to work for this company for 10 years and gain experience. But the best thing about entrepreneurship is you don’t need anyone’s permission.

“And the world changes so quickly that 10 years from now, that company [you want to create] might not be able to exist because of AI. So just get started. I also think [you should] build something that you would use, or at least someone very close to you would use, because then at least you have one customer. 90% of businesses don’t even have a single customer, so by at least having one, you’re already in the top 10%.”