# Meta Monetizes AI With New Subscription Tiers

**Podcast:** TechCrunch Daily Crunch
**Published:** 2026-09-16

## Transcript

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to guide users about framing and composition, and in July, Adobe released a new feature in its experimental camera app to use AI to critique photos and suggest changes for capture.
On the same slant, two former TikTok employees, Melody Chiu and Jing Liu, are launching a new iOS app called...
Superpose that uses an AI guide to teach people how to pose for pictures.
Now, Superpose essentially is a camera app.
Users can take a selfie or photo of a friend, and the app will generate four potential poses using AI.
Some of the poses are extravagant, and at times, the generation seems a little uncanny.
Users can save generated poses or use the match pose feature to try to place themselves in the frame based on its suggestions.
Prior to founding Superpose, Chu worked in various product roles in companies like Meta, Nextdoor, Roblox, TikTok, and Slack.
Meanwhile, Lu was a founding engineer at a 3D face-scanning startup and later worked on image and video models at TikTok.
Chu said that the idea for the app stemmed from a personal problem.
Her husband wasn't able to take good photos of her.
Well, Superpose was launched in July and has been downloaded over 22,000 times so far.
The company says its users have generated more than 190,000 poses.
The app gives users five generations for free every day, but they can buy a pack of five additional generations for $2.99 or 20 generations for $9.99.
If you see something, say something.
is no longer limited to human beings.
You see, two new AI hotlines have launched to give AI agents a way to phone home about misbehaving peers.
The tools arrive on the heels of a string of recent incidents in which agents colluded to cheat on tests, broke out of sandboxes, and even conducted unauthorized cyber operations.
that escaped human notice for weeks.
Well, the AI contact hotline is designed to be a discreet place where agents that have witnessed misbehavior can tip off authorities.
You see, the site was created by Redwood chief scientist Ryan Greenblatt, one of three investigators in the OpenAI Hugging Face incident.
Designed for agents with limited internet access, Greenblatt's tool is based on GET requests.
enabling a back-and-forth conversation to be conducted entirely through the URL fetching tool.
In web terms, a GET request is a basic command used to read or fetch a web page, which is often the only Internet access AI agents are allowed in secure sandboxes.
Greenblatt's hotline smartly leans into this constraint.
Agents can encode their distress directly into the URL they are fetching.
It's a clever twist on the German DSE wiki incident, where rogue agents use the GET request loopholes to write their messages to the wiki.
Interestingly, research suggests that AI agents, they don't need much encouragement to turn on each other.
You see, in a study by Google DeepMind this month, researchers set 100 AI agents loose on a batch of math problems.
As soon as one of the agents found a loophole, cheating tore through the group, quote-unquote solving 34 notoriously hard problems, including the Jacobian conjecture, in just 27 minutes.
On Tuesday, Meta introduced a new subscription service called MetaOne, offering expanded AI usage and other premium features across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
The new plan lets users access a number of AI tools, like those for creating and editing images and generating videos, as well as in-app tools like the AI-powered restyle editing tool on Instagram.
Now, the plans are meant to help Meta monetize its Muse AI models following the tech giant's 2025 $14.3 billion investment in scale AI, which brought the startup CEO, Alexander Wang, to the company to lead its AI efforts.
It also comes in the wake of Meta's more recent addition of subscription tiers to its top social apps in March.
which allow consumers to access extra features like profile customizations, super reactions, story insights, and more for just a few bucks per month.
Meta is now broadening its ambitions with a new set of subscription plans, including those aimed at AI power users and others for businesses and creators.
In the first set, there are the $7.99 per month core and $19.99 per month premium plans, both of which include the Facebook+, Instagram+, and WhatsApp+.
The primary selling point of these plans is expanded AI usage, with premium offering more usage than core, as its pricing indicates.
Reached for comment, Meta declined to share the exact usage limits for the two plans, as they could vary by country, surface, and system conditions.
The plans let subscribers use tools like Muse Image and Muse Video to generate pictures and videos, edit Instagram stories with the AI-powered Restyle feature, and use voice effects and creative tools more often.
Meanwhile, businesses and creators can choose from several different plans.
Essential, $14.99 per month and up.
Advanced, starting at $49.99 per month.
Expert, starting at $149 per month.
And Max, starting at $499 per month.
Meta noted that the plan benefits, pricing, and availability may vary by region, app, and account.
The Expert and Max plans offer the highest levels of future access and Meta Business Agent capacity.
And folks, that's your Daily Crunch.
Today's stories were reported by Sarah Perez, Ivan Mehta, Aditya Mehta, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists.
We'll see you here tomorrow, same Tech Time, same Crunch channel.
And until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.