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Meta To Start Testing AI Subscription Services 51

Meta will begin testing paid subscriptions for its Meta AI app and website, with a $7.99/month Meta One Plus plan and a more capable $19.99/month Meta One Premium plan offering. The test will start next month in Singapore, Guatemala, and Bolivia as Meta looks for AI revenue beyond advertising while continuing to offer a free tier. CNBC reports: Naomi Gleit, the head of product at Meta, revealed the subscription testing in an Instagram video, announcing that the plans "give people who use Meta AI more to work with, more capacity, bigger, more complex requests, and more room to create for businesses and creators."

Meta One Plus will cost $7.99 a month and the Meta One Premium plan will cost $19.99 a month, the company confirmed. The more expensive version offers users additional computing capacity to produce more comprehensive responses and other advanced features. The company will continue to provide a free version of the app and site.

"We're offering premium tools that allow you to enhance presence, supercharge content, automate tasks, and protect your brand," Gleit said in the post. "We're also thinking about how to bring this all together in a way that makes sense."

Meta To Start Testing AI Subscription Services

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  • by tonymercmobily ( 658708 ) on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @07:32PM (#66163388) Homepage Journal

    They will first need to tell people that they actually do have an AI.
    I am not sure anybody actually knows.

    • WhatsApp started flashing an expanding "Ask Meta AI" tooltip every time you open the app recently.

      • by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @07:47PM (#66163414) Homepage

        They might get a better responsie by requesting $4.99/month to remove the Meta AI slop from their Facebook interface.

    • by larwe ( 858929 )
      They've been thrusting it in your face in the Facebook UI for a while - and it recently got more obnoxious. Absolutely the last place I need "AI".
      • With the growing ability to run local models at home on your own hardware, especially if you have Apple Silicon computers....I'm wondering if soon we'll see a LARGE drop in subscriptions to the Frontier models?

        From what I'm seeing these local models can do what about 98% of the populace needs....and you aren't sharing your data with a corporation that is just sucking up all your data into their AI?

        • by larwe ( 858929 )
          Home automation systems don't have any need to go through a cloud to connect a local sensor to a local device (e.g. "motion sensor turns on lamp"). Yet... in practical terms, all the major ecosystems enforce this requirement. So, just because it isn't technically necessary to force people to use a paid cloud service doesn't mean it won't be done :(
    • by haruchai ( 17472 ) on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @08:12PM (#66163442)

      Anyone who's seen Zuck testify at Congress has seen Meta AI in action.
      I'm quite impressed at how close to human it appeared

    • by Archfeld ( 6757 )

      I use the Meta AI for illustrations for my D&D game. I'm not sure I'd pay for it but it has made a positive impact in the game. ie the players rave about having images for bad guys.

      • I use the Meta AI for illustrations for my D&D game. I'm not sure I'd pay for it but it has made a positive impact in the game. ie the players rave about having images for bad guys.

        Yep; lots of people use this stuff.

        This is just random self-preening going on here.

        When I was a kid, it was people who would brag about not owning a TV or supposedly never watching one. Sure were a lot of TVs around for something nobody ever used though, lol

    • Meta also had enterprise groupware and an Amazon Echo competitor but they failed to advertise them. Also, since 2022, Zuck has set alight a cumulative $100B so far on AI-class server gear but without a product or strategy to use it. Zuck and Altman appear to be competing as to who can spend the most money and ruin the planet without a profitable product or a plan the fastest.
  • I have no use for social media content enhancing crap from Meta. I just want to be able to pay for Instagram with no recommendations and with a chronological feed.

    • by znrt ( 2424692 )

      just append '/?variant=following' to the url: https://www.instagram.com/?var... [instagram.com]
      it will do exactly what you are asking for. it's actually the only way i ever access ig.

      it should work even on the phone. if you're using the app then ... just stop doing that. it's documented spyware (thus also a security concern) and user hostile crap sw anyway.

    • by znrt ( 2424692 )

      sorry, i now realize you meant facebook. can't help with that, but these are things you can confidently ask a llm about.

  • by devslash0 ( 4203435 ) on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @07:35PM (#66163392)

    I guess this is the moment when they realise that the only reason why some people use AI because it's free or forced upon us. No marketing campaign will ever make people pay this sort of money pay for a silly chatbot, especially the Meta AI crap.

    • by larwe ( 858929 ) on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @07:46PM (#66163412)
      I think "people" are not the target market; influencers (and wannabe influencers) and brands are the target market. I.e. it is a spam-enhancement tool.
      • The target market you're thinking of is much, much, much too small to pay for the AI expenditure offering the service. The only target market that makes sense at non-astronomical prices is world wide, massive numbers of users.
        • by larwe ( 858929 )
          Speaking as someone in product management, I cannot realistically believe any product manager at Facebook has the hubris (or perhaps chutzpah) to believe that the mass-market will pay the equivalent of a streaming service subscription just in order to access "AI features". I may be completely underestimating the number of people over there microdosing on shrooms, but I don't think so. Even if I'm wrong about this, it's absolutely bubblethink for an outside observer to believe that the masses will pay for th
        • The target market you're thinking of is much, much, much too small to pay for the AI expenditure offering the service.

          This market already exists and people are already paying. I mean we've run endless stories about some AI chatbot at some company that didn't develop AI having their system screw up. You think a corporation like Chrysler isn't paying a company to use their AI tools?

          Individual consumers aren't going to pay for this rubbish. Only corporations and businesses will.

    • There are countless companies out there paying actual money to implement chatbots. You and I are not the target market for this.

      • And they will surely be successful because they already have a proven market of people who think that Facebook does targeted advertising, when its idea of targeting is to aim at anyone who's ever interacted with any content autotagged with any of the advertiser's chosen keywords, even if they laughed and blocked. As such they will probably fall for the idea that the chatbots will work, as well.

        • Well to be fair to Facebook you just described the entire online advertising industry. The kind of industry that is feeding me adverts for diving underwater camera counterweights because I just ... already bought some a few weeks ago. This is literally how the entire internet economy operates and yet somehow it's still a $700bn industry.

          • I'm readily willing (heh heh) to believe that, but I mostly don't see ads any more except the spam that makes it past the filters, and almost none of that is actually targeted; and the only one I've seen through clearly is Facebook, because of what happens with the "interests" in your profile when you delete them. i.e. they return most meaninglessly.

    • by sodul ( 833177 )

      There is a percentage of the population that will pay for this, I have a brother that is enamored with AI but he is also mentally unstable and he has jumped into the crypto fad.

      I'm actually glad that companies are starting to charge customers for AI use as we are starting to move away from the purely speculative bubble and into the real market realities. This should give a reality check to investors and we might hope that it will bring market corrections, which in turn will correct the supply chain for chip

      • "Even Microsoft seems to have gotten the memo that Windows is very inefficient compared to macOS, and they are now working on making their OS less wasteful of hardware resources."

        I can believe that Microsoft said they are now working on making their OS less wasteful of hardware resources. I can believe that they will spend billions on meetings, conferences, advertising, announcements, reshuffles, layers of management, pamphlets, t-shirts and FSM-knows what else, but I cannot believe that Microsoft can make

  • I would so love to be able to make it so Meta stops shoving AI in my face. I don't want it and if they can't pay for the compute resources, then I am not going to help them justify the expense.

  • Oh sure, all these people who've been laid off and downsized and subject to higher costs of living are definitely going to set up a new recurring payment to use the pointless, idiotic lie machine that the upper crust have deigned to replace their presence with. That's definitely real, and the secret to infinite financial growth.
  • In developed countries, where people and companies can buy the hardware (say, a cluster of ryzen strix halos) it makes no sense to pay monthly for meta's AI. But in countries where people and companies can not bear the upfront costs? This actually makes sense.

    Read again the list of pilot countries in light of the previous paaragraph.

    Full disclosure: i live in LatAm, but not in Bolivia

    • by allo ( 1728082 ) on Thursday May 28, 2026 @07:17AM (#66163936)

      You really think someone who would potentially use Meta AI is able and willing to buy a cluster of strix halos?

      Even with reasonable ideas like running a small model on an average graphics card it is simply too complicated to set up for many people, not straightforward to connect to your mobile device (and people might want to shut down their PC, some don't even have one anymore) and overall more maintenance intensive for someone who rather shells out a few dollars to not have to worry about running own LLM.

      You and me can run own LLM. Average Joe can't and doesn't want to.

      • You and me can run own LLM. Average Joe can't and doesn't want to.

        Honestly you're being a bit generous here. Slashdot is a place full of technie nerds, but I'd wager a very significant portion of them couldn't wrap their head around setting up running their own completely open LLM system.

        • by allo ( 1728082 )

          There are some (mostly) one-click solutions. Some time ago llamafile was one compiling everything you need into a single file (that works on multiple operation systems), currently you probably use some of the installers that set everything up when you're on Windows. On Linux the challenge may be to set up CUDA. Afterward you can probably also just download a compile llama.cpp and a gguf file and get started. Tools like oobabooga also tend to have start.sh scripts, that try to setup everything that is needed

  • So surely Meta will have no paying customers, will they?

  • Let's say meta subscribes 100 million people, that's 2 billion a month and 24 billion a year. They spent 70 billion on datacenters last year and 130 billion this year. Do you think they will make that money back? I don't, they won't get that many subscribers.

  • Turn off the servers and go home. That makes sense
    • Meta is too far behind to obtain much of the AI hype revenue. Either they lose if AI works well enough or don't make enough revenue before it all crashes.

      Their Meta Glasses are also about to lose to Google.

      Luckily, they still have plenty of algorithms to influence anyone dumb enough to have a Meta account.

  • Who in those countries has $20 (presumably USD) per month for discretionary spending?

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