(Dominika Zarzycka/Getty Images)

Meta is supercharging its subscription businesses

The free-app giant never really cared about recurring revenue. Now, it’s launching paid plans for all sorts of stuff.

6/5/26 9:38AM

Since its founding, Meta’s revenue engine has revolved around ads, with only a passing glance toward subscriptions. Now, a string of recent announcements and reporting show Meta in a full-court press to grow subscription revenue as a way to help pay for its ballooning AI capital expenditure budget — now slated for up to $145 billion this year — and diversify from advertising revenue.

While Meta’s core products remain free, Meta One-branded subscriptions — some rolling out and some in testing — unlock a number of added features for its apps and hardware. (Paying for the subscriptions doesn’t remove ads.) Here’s an overview of what’s on offer:

Subscription: Instagram Plus, Facebook Plus, and WhatsApp Plus.
Cost: $3.99 a month ($2.99 for WhatsApp).
What it does: Paid additions to its most popular apps that offer extra features like profile customization, super reactions, and story insights.
Will anyone use it? These apps remain free for regular users, so the market would be for power users. That’s a small subset of Meta’s user base — but its user base is enormous, with 3.5 billion daily active users.

Subscription: AI plans for people: Meta One Plus and Meta One Premium.
Cost: $7.99 and $19.99.
What it does: Gives individuals additional access to Meta’s AI chatbot to generate images, videos, and reasoning beyond the limits of the free service.
Will anyone use it? This is Meta’s play to capture consumer AI revenue directly from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. While the $19.99 Premium tier rivals flagship offerings like ChatGPT Plus, Gemini Advanced, and Anthropic Pro, the real battlefield is the low-cost Plus tier. It goes head-to-head with OpenAI’s budget $8 ChatGPT Go plan, but Meta’s deal includes Plus subscriptions for free. Meta is betting that casual users who already spend their lives in these social ecosystems will choose the bundled value and convenience of in-app AI over navigating to a stand-alone competitor.

Subscription: Plans for businesses and creators: Meta One Essential and Meta One Advanced.
Cost: $14.99 and $49.99.
What it does: The Essential plan includes a verified badge, impersonation protection, and an enhanced link sheet. On top of that, the Advanced plan includes a variety of tools, including optimized search, links within posts and reels, insights, optimized scheduling, and collaboration. In the coming weeks, these plans will include upgraded AI usage and the app Plus features. In the future, these plans will include Meta Business Agent, an AI agent deployed in chat that is designed to make product recommendations, book appointments, qualify leads, and close sales.
Will anyone use it? Meta says that a million businesses already use Meta Business Agent on WhatsApp and Messenger. With more than a billion active threads with businesses on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram a day, the value proposition is simple: letting mom-and-pop shops and large brands handle customer acquisition, support, and sales 24/7 without hiring a massive customer service team. Because it integrates natively with major third-party platforms like Shopify and Zendesk, this potentially represents a significant threat to existing third-party chatbot services.

Subscription: Hatch (internal name, unreleased).
Cost: The Information reports up to $200 a month, but Meta says pricing has not yet been determined.
What it does: Consumer version of the OpenClaw AI agent tool that can vibe code new software tools, schedule events on users’ calendars, and send emails on their behalf, among other actions.
Will anyone use it? While the price point puts it in line with the top offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI, it’s not clear whether users will get the same bang for their buck. As The Information reported, “In its development so far, Hatch has been powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 models. When launched, Hatch will be powered by Meta’s latest AI model, Muse Spark, the person said.”

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While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5