Meta dropped new subscription tiers this week. $4 for Instagram Plus. Another $4 for Facebook. $3 gets you WhatsApp Plus. The global rollout starts somewhere this summer.
They aren’t building a paywall for basic access. You won’t have to pay just to log in. But if you want to know who rewatched your Story or pin five posts to the top of your feed instead of one? That costs money. It’s a revenue play. Diversification, as the suits call it. Mark Zuckerberg is trying to figure out how to extract value from users without losing them entirely.
Sound familiar? It should.
“Loving husband, father of four men, VP Product @ Meta.”
That tongue-in-cheek LinkedIn bio belongs to Evan Spiegel. Co-founder and CEO of Snap. He has never worked for Meta. Never stepped foot in Menlo Park as an employee. Yet his company’s moves tend to ripple through Mark’s world with uncanny predictability. Remember Instagram Stories? Launched in 2016. Then-CEO Kevin Systrom basically admitted on TechCrunch that they deserve credit. That was the start of a long history of Instagram iterating on Snapchat features until they looked indistinguishable.
Look at Maps. Snap launched a tool in 2017 letting you see pinpoint locations of friends who opted in. Instagram didn’t launch a comparable feature until last year. Disappearing photos? Snapchat’s bread and butter. Now Instagram is pushing “Instants.” Unfiltered. Ephemeral. It feels less like BeReal and more like a late entry into a party that ended years ago.
Meta acknowledges this trajectory without blinking. Maria Cubeta, a spokesperson, told me via email that they are testing “Meta One,” a broader subscription umbrella. The goal? Deeper ways to use their apps and their upcoming AI glasses. Profile customization. Story insights. Super reactions. It is just the beginning. Expect higher tiers for creators and businesses. Expect access to Meta AI to be a premium good.
What do you get for four bucks right now? Instagram Plus is the heavyweight here. You can pin more posts. Choose exotic bio fonts. Create siloed audiences so only your close friends see that one specific Story. You also get the “Super Heart.” Facebook Plus is quieter. It mostly gives you control over Story experiences and lets you see who rewatches your content. WhatsApp Plus lets you pin more chats and adds visual tweaks like premium stickers.
Snapchat launched its own subscription, called Snap+, in 2022. Also four dollars a month. It offered exclusive emojis at first. Now it’s an expanding library of features and AI tools. As of February, that strategy hit a $1 billion annualized revenue runrate. Over 25 million subscribers globally. Not bad. Although Snapchat itself is still struggling to turn a profit, despite being the feature donor to half the industry.
So here we are. Meta renamed itself after chasing metaverse clout. Now they’re mimicking Snap’s monetization structure. Down to the naming convention. “Plus.” Why invent a wheel that has already started making money?
Where does this leave us? With slightly prettier interfaces and a heavier bill for vanity metrics. Who rewatched your Story three times? Why does it matter? You pay to know. You pay to optimize your digital personality for an algorithm that barely acknowledges you.
Keep an eye on what Snap does next. It is a sneak peek at what Meta will do in two years.
