Meta expands subscription push with new AI-focused plans
TechCrunch Sarah Perez ● Covered by 2 sources
Meta launched new AI subscription plans across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. It’s another way to squeeze money out of its AI spend, and the tiers are already pulling in real revenue.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Sarah Perez — read the original for the full story.
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Meta is widening its subscription experiment again, this time with a package called Meta One that puts more AI features behind a monthly fee across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The pitch is straightforward: pay Meta, get more access to image creation, video generation, editing tools, and other premium features that sit inside the apps people already use every day.
This isn’t coming out of nowhere. Meta has been trying to monetize its Muse AI models, and that effort sits alongside the company’s 2025 $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, which brought Alexandr Wang in to lead Meta’s AI work. It also follows the subscription tiers Meta added in March for its main social apps, with small monthly prices and perks like profile customizations, super reactions, and story insights.
Those earlier plans appear to be working. Appfigures says Instagram’s daily worldwide revenue averaged $1.2 million in the week of September 9, while Facebook reached $528,000 a day. Compared with the prior week, that was up 475% for Instagram and 143% for Facebook. U.S. users also made up 32% of Instagram revenue and 39% of Facebook revenue after the plans started gaining traction.
Meta’s new lineup gets more complicated from here. For AI power users, there are Core at $7.99 a month and Premium at $19.99, both bundling the Facebook Plus, Instagram Plus, and WhatsApp Plus features, with Premium offering more AI usage than Core. Meta wouldn’t say exactly where the limits fall, only that they can vary by country, surface, and system conditions.
Businesses and creators get their own ladder: Essential starts at $14.99 a month, Advanced at $49.99, Expert at $149, and Max at $499. The higher tiers add more access to Meta Business Agent, more analytics, more scheduling, more linked devices, and more capacity overall. Meta says the benefits and pricing can vary by region, app, and account, which is corporate speak for “don’t expect this menu to stay simple.”
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Meta has decided the cleanest way to sell AI is to hide it inside the apps everyone already checks out of habit. That is very on-brand: charge a little here, a lot there, and call it a product strategy instead of a tax on attention. The bigger surprise is not the complexity, but that people may actually pay for it.
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