Meta One: Zuckerberg finally puts a price tag on all that AI spending

Meta is launching paid add-ons for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, with prices ranging from $2.99 to $19.99 per month, as part of a strategy to reduce reliance on ad revenue and justify its massive AI infrastructure spending to investors. The new subscription tiers include cosmetic perks for social apps and separate AI offerings that charge users for additional compute, reasoning, and content generation. Testing begins next month in select countries, with creator and business plans rolling out in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Thailand, and Bangladesh.

Meta One: Zuckerberg finally puts a price tag on all that AI spending Meta is rolling out paid add-ons for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp worldwide while building a separate paid AI offering. The move is meant to reduce the company's dependence on ad revenue and likely to justify its massive AI infrastructure spending https://the-decoder.com/big-techs-ai-spending-balloons-to-725-billion-this-year/ to investors. Instagram Plus and Facebook Plus cost $3.99 a month, WhatsApp Plus runs $2.99. The perks are mostly cosmetic: story stats, custom icons, and super reactions. Meta's existing verification program, Meta Verified, stays separate. The more interesting part is the AI pricing. Meta One Plus $7.99 and Meta One Premium $19.99 follow the same model OpenAI and Google use, with users paying for more compute, longer reasoning from the model, and more image and video generation. Testing starts next month in Singapore, Guatemala, and Bolivia. Plans aimed at creators and businesses $14.99 and $49.99 are launching in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Thailand, and Bangladesh. Meta recently unveiled its new AI model Muse https://the-decoder.com/metas-muse-spark-is-its-first-frontier-model-and-its-first-without-open-weights/ after running into problems with the Llama series https://the-decoder.com/you-certainly-dont-tell-a-researcher-like-me-what-to-do-says-lecun-as-he-exits-meta-for-his-own-startup/ . AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section. Subscribe now