Meta launched Meta One on Tuesday, a new subscription service designed to unlock expanded AI usage and premium features across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
The move aims to monetise the company’s Muse AI models. It follows a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI during 2025, which saw Alexandr Wang join Meta to lead its artificial intelligence strategy.
This launch builds on subscription tiers introduced in March for the company’s main social apps. Those plans allowed users to pay a few dollars per month for extras such as profile customisations, super reactions and story insights. Data from Appfigures shows these earlier plans are already generating significant income. Instagram’s daily worldwide revenue averaged $1.2 million during the week of September 9, while Facebook’s daily revenue reached $528,000. Both figures represent increases of 475% and 143% respectively compared to the previous week.
Meta is now broadening its approach with new tiers targeting AI power users, alongside specific offers for businesses and creators.
The first group includes the $7.99/month Core plan and the $19.99/month Premium plan. Both cover the features found in Facebook Plus, Instagram Plus and WhatsApp Plus. The main difference is access to AI tools, with the Premium tier offering higher usage limits than Core.
Subscribers can generate images and videos using Muse Image and Muse Video. They can also edit Instagram Stories with the Restyle feature, apply voice effects, and use other creative tools more frequently.
Businesses and creators have a separate set of options. The Essential plan starts at $14.99/month, Advanced at $49.99/month, Expert at $149/month, and Max at $499/month. Meta noted that pricing, benefits and availability may vary by region, app and account.
Essential provides tools to manage a business or creator profile, expanded access to the Meta Business Agent for customer responses, a verified badge on the WhatsApp Business App, and impersonation detection.
Advanced adds the ability to schedule stories up to 30 days in advance. It also supports links in organic posts and reels, offers exportable analytics, provides deeper audience insights, allows team member access, supports more linked devices, increases business broadcast credits, and boosts the number of Meta Business Agent responses.
Both Essential and Advanced include an enhanced profile displaying a website, locations and reviews. They also feature a bold “follow” button on reels and automatically send follow invitations to people who engage with the content.
Meta plans to add more features and agent skills later, covering end-to-end marketing, business operations, content creation and optimisation. It will also soon launch Edits Plus for the Edits content-creation app. This update will provide extra cloud storage for syncing projects and additional usage of the Edits AI assistant.
The Expert and Max plans grant the highest levels of feature access and Meta Business Agent capacity.
While the multiple tiers might seem confusing, the new plans could boost Meta’s revenue and help recoup its AI investments.
Appfigures noted that U.S. users accounted for 32% of Instagram’s revenue and 39% of Facebook’s revenue after the plans gained traction on September 9. This was roughly 10% above each app’s historical U.S. baseline. BNP Paribas forecasts the subscription push will add $13.5 billion in revenue by 2028, while Truist estimates the company could add $20 billion by 2030.
