Meta is looking to recoup some of the billions it’s poured into AI.
This week it debuted Meta One, a new subscription service for individual users, content creators, and business owners (though with varying prices for each) that “gives subscribers more self-expression features and AI usage, helps creators spend more time creating and less time guessing, and gives businesses new tools designed to help them grow,” it said in a company blog post.
You’ll have to bear with us here for a moment, because Meta One is launching with a lot of tiers. Here’s the breakdown…
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The key selling point for the entire service, regardless of tier, is more utilization of Meta’s Muse chatbot, which launched Sept. 8.
Meta One Core subscribers, who’ll pay $7.99/month, get “more AI usage,” while Meta One Premium subscribers ($19.99/month) get “expanded AI usage.”
What exactly does “more” and “expanded” computation mean? Meta won’t commit to hard numbers. Instead, it told TechCrunch that usage limits can vary by “country, surface and system conditions.” It’s not clear if these limits are laid out for subscribers at the top of each month, or if they fluctuate from day to day as Meta’s data centers ooze output.
Meta says this is not the start of a plan to paywall Muse usage.
“Meta AI will still be free for everyday use–Core and Premium are for people who want even more creative freedom from our AI tools,” it said. “In early testing, more than half of subscribers engaged with both AI and expression features in our bundled plans, with AI features like Restyle and voice effects on Instagram among the top reasons people subscribed.”
All Meta One subscribers, regardless of tier, also get Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp Plus included. Meta says current subscribers get access to around 50 tools across these platforms, and that it intends to roll out more features on Edits, AI glasses, and more.
Here’s where things get a little more complicated.
On top of launching Core and Premium, Meta One has separate plans for content creators and small businesses. These are called Meta One Essential ($14.99/mo), Advanced ($49.99/mo), Expert ($149/mo), and Max ($499/mo).
Essential’s biggest perk is “more” access to Meta Business Agent, a chatbot that will respond to potential customers 24/7 on WhatsApp. Advanced brings in 30-day ahead-of-time post scheduling, the ability to (finally) add clickable links in posts and Reels, and exportable analytics, as well as shared team access to the account and “more Meta Business Agent responses.”
Expert and Max both offer bigger versions of Advanced’s perks. More links in posts and Reels, more staff members with account access, and more agent responses (again, Meta is not giving specific numbers).
Max has one exclusive perk that might pique creators’ interest: a promise that they’ll have 24/7 “unlimited” access to Meta’s support specialists for help with their accounts. This could be a big draw in an industry where platforms have majorly scaled back in-house creator managers and points-of-contact, leaving creators stuck dealing with chatbot responses and long, confusing recovery processes if their accounts are compromised or something else goes wrong.
While we’re sure Meta One will attract paying customers (Meta says it’s had 15 million “subscriptions and trials” to date–no clarity on how many of each), we’re wondering how Meta will handle the resulting deluge of AI-generated content.
Its goal here is to push Muse usage, and it specifically says subscribers will have more compute for pumping out generated video and images. Those, along with generated chatbot responses, could be a flood it’s not prepared to handle. We’ve seen the same pattern unfold at platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat, where big tech owners unleash AI tools, and then have to clamp down on the same slop content they enabled users to ‘create.’
A recent Futurism investigation showed Meta is already having problems controlling manipulative, gross, and violent generated videos, many of them depicting explicit child abuse. When Futurism reported its findings to Meta, singling out eight accounts that were posting large amounts of this content, Meta only removed two of them.
