Meta is starting to sell consumer subscriptions to its Meta AI chatbot for the first time, an important step toward building a new revenue stream that helps offset hundreds of billions of dollars in the company’s investments in artificial intelligence.
The new subscriptions will have two tiers. The basic plan, called Meta One Plus, will cost $7.99 per month and is aimed at people who frequently use Meta AI to generate images and videos or rely on it for longer reasoning tasks, according to a company spokesperson.
A more advanced plan, called Meta One Premium, will cost $19.99 per month and will include the same feature set as Meta One Plus but in larger quantities, the spokesperson added. Meta AI subscription is initially launching in Singapore, Guatemala and Bolivia, with plans to expand to other countries later.
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Users will be able to continue using the Meta AI chatbot for free for image and video generation, but will eventually encounter a limit with repeated use. Meta preferred not to detail the usage limits for each level, but stated that the Premium plan offers a significantly greater amount of usage than the basic plan.
Meta’s shares, which had been falling slightly this Wednesday, jumped more than 3% after the announcement. Year-to-date, the stock has fallen by around 4%.
Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has been under pressure from investors to demonstrate that his billion-dollar bet on AI will translate into relevant revenue. Zuckerberg has pledged to spend at least $600 billion on AI infrastructure over the next few years, and the company is currently building a data center in Louisiana that is expected to cost at least $200 billion. In the April earnings call, investors reacted badly to the announcement that this year’s capital expenditures (capex) would be greater than initially estimated.
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Meta has long argued that its investments in AI are already paying off in the form of highly targeted and efficient advertising, enhanced by AI models. But the company is also looking for other ways to recoup this expense, and subscriptions to consumer chatbots have become popular among competitors such as Alphabet’s Google and OpenAI. Both offer subscription plans at similar price points.
Subscriptions to Meta’s products, brought together under the Meta One program, are gaining weight within the social media giant’s strategy, as it tries to diversify a business that is still almost entirely dependent on advertising.
Meta has been testing subscriptions for WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook and intends to expand these offerings globally, Helen Ma, the company’s head of subscriptions, said in an interview. These plans range between US$2.99 and US$3.99 per month, depending on the market, and users will also be able to purchase them in a bundled format, Ma added. Those who subscribe to Meta AI will also have access to specific offers for each app.
The company is also launching updated subscription products for businesses and content creators. These include two new tiers: Meta One Essential at $14.99 per month and Meta One Advanced at $49.99 per month. The most expensive plan includes access to human support for the user’s Instagram and Facebook pages, something that has historically been a point of frustration for small businesses using Meta’s products.
Meta hopes to eventually sell access to AI agents in conjunction with these offerings, Ma said.
Subscriptions still represent a very small portion of Meta’s business. The company reported $1.29 billion in “non-advertising revenue” in the first quarter, a category that includes subscription fees but also hardware sales like Meta AI glasses and virtual reality headsets. The advertising business totaled more than US$55 billion in sales in the same period.
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