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Tech giant Meta plans to pilot a premium subscription service for Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp users in the coming months, its latest paid service experiment.
The new products will offer capabilities including expanded artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.
Under the plan, the platform’s core services will continue to be free to use.
The company also plans to test subscription features such as the Vibes video generation app, which it says “brings your ideas to life with new AI-powered visual creation tools.”
Meta released Vibes in September as part of the latest version of its Meta AI application.
The company also plans to use Manus, a Chinese-founded artificial intelligence company it acquired for $2 billion (£1.46 billion) in December, in its subscription program, according to TechCrunch, which first reported the news.
The company will also continue to offer standalone Manus subscriptions to enterprises.
At the time, Meta said the deal would help improve its own artificial intelligence by giving people access to “agents” — tools that can do complex things, such as plan a trip or give a presentation, with minimal user interaction.
“Manus’ outstanding talents will join Meta’s team to provide universal agents for our consumer and commercial products, including Meta AI,” the company said in a blog post.
After relocating from China to Singapore, Manus seeks to differentiate itself from rival AI developers with what it claims are “truly autonomous” agents.
While many chatbots require users to ask questions repeatedly to get the responses they want, Manus said its service can independently plan, execute and complete tasks based on instructions.
Last year, Facebook tested limits on the number of links some users could share when posting content on the social media platform.
Some UK and US users saw notifications saying they could only share a certain number of links in Facebook posts without a subscription.
The company describes it as “a limited test to see if the ability to publish more posts with links would provide additional value to subscribers.”
In 2023, Meta began rolling out a paid verification service, offering Facebook and Instagram users a blue tick for a monthly fee.
