Meta Tests AI as the Upsell for Free Social Media

Meta is asking consumers who have never paid for Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp to pay for new versions of them that have more features. The company on Tuesday (Sept. 15) launched Meta One with more than 50 features and said it has reached 15 million subscriptions and trials to date.

Meta One folds the single-app plans the company rolled out earlier this year, Instagram Plus and Facebook Plus at $3.99 a month and WhatsApp Plus at $2.99, into two consumer bundles. Core, at $7.99, adds higher usage limits for Meta AI image and video generation, Instagram’s Restyle editing tool and voice effects. Premium, at $19.99, offers the most artificial intelligence usage. Creator and business tiers run from $14.99 to $499 a month.

Meta said the core experience across its apps and Meta AI will remain free. The paid tiers unlock features the company says are too compute-intensive to offer everyone at once. In early bundle tests, more than half of subscribers used both AI and expression features, and Meta said Restyle and voice effects were among the top reasons people subscribed.

Meta declined to share exact usage limits for the plans, TechCrunch reported, saying they vary by country, surface and system conditions. The 15 million figure combines paid subscriptions with trials, and Meta hasn’t broken it down by tier.

AI Spending Needs a Bill Payer

The bundles give Meta a way to charge the users who consume the most processing power. Capital expenditures reached $31.08 billion in the second quarter, and Meta narrowed its 2026 outlook to $130 billion to $145 billion. Advertising still supplies nearly all of its revenue.

The single-app plans are already producing money. Instagram’s daily worldwide revenue averaged $1.2 million as of the week of Sept. 9, up 475% from the week before, and Facebook’s reached $528,000, up 143%, according to Apptopia. BNP Paribas forecasts the subscription push will add $13.5 billion in revenue by 2028, and Truist estimates $20 billion by 2030, Apptopia wrote.

Meta has resisted charging for AI features longer than its rivals. Google cut its entry-level AI plan from $7.99 to $4.99 a month in June, and OpenAI was weighing price reductions of its own, PYMNTS reported at the time. Meta moved the other way, testing paid AI tiers for the first time that month. A report by The Information found only 5% of ChatGPT’s 800 million monthly users were on paid tiers, and that count included enterprise accounts.

Consumers Use AI Daily but Pay Rarely

The audience Meta is targeting exists. More than 6 in 10 U.S. consumers used dedicated AI platforms in the past year, according to PYMNTS Intelligence. The question is how many of them want more than the free tier gives them.

PYMNTS Intelligence found in September that mainstream users now make up 33% of consumers, the largest engaged group. Power users, the segment most likely to hit usage caps, fell to 8.5% of consumers, down 24% from September 2025, even as their most-used activities held firm.

That pattern favors Meta’s structure. A $7.99 bundle competes with a Spotify or a cloud storage plan, not a $200 frontier AI subscription, and it is sold inside apps that 3.6 billion people already open every day. The early numbers are encouraging but incomplete. Fifteen million subscriptions and trials is a large top of funnel. Meta hasn’t said how many convert, how many stay past the first month or how the AI bundles perform. Meta said it plans to extend Meta One to its Edits video app and its AI glasses over time.