Meta is asking WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook users to pay for the service.
The company is launching “premium” versions of all of its accounts, offering users extra features and other bonuses in return for a monthly fee.
Those features include extra ways of personalising accounts and insights into how many people are watching content that has been posted. The company promised that “more fun features” will come in the future.
The subscription costs $3.99 for Facebook and Instagram, and $2.99 for WhatsApp. Users must pay the monthly subscription separately.
For now, the extra features are relatively limited. On Instagram, for instance, users will be able to see how many times a story has been rewatched – though not who has done it – as well as allowing stories to stay up for 24 hours, giving them extra reach by highlighting a specific story once per week, preview stories without showing up on the list of viewers and the ability to search through the list of people who have watched a story for specific users.
Other personalisation features include the ability to have custom fonts on a profile or to use custom icons for the apps themselves.
On WhatsApp, the premium subscription offers more ways of connecting such as extra stickers and the option to choose custom ringtones.
The global rollout of the changes comes after parent company Meta tested its premium offerings in recent months.
And it is the first of what the company suggested will be a whole suite of premium tools, including paid plans focused on professional users such as businesses and creators, and additional payments for extra AI tools. Those AI tools will allow people to speak to Meta’s AI systems for longer, for instance, and are set to be more expensive than the premium tiers.
Meta already has another subscription offering, known as Meta Verified, for which users pay for a blue check that confirms their identity as well as giving them extra protections against impersonation or hacking. That subscription will stay around, and be run separately.
