Summary: WhatsApp has begun testing a paid consumer subscription called WhatsApp Plus at approximately EUR 2.49 per month, offering cosmetic upgrades including 18 chat themes, custom icons, exclusive ringtones, and expanded pinned chats, following Instagram Plus which launched in three markets on 30 March. The subscriptions represent Meta’s first simultaneous consumer-facing paid tiers across its apps, part of a diversification strategy announced in January as the company spends $115-135 billion on AI infrastructure while advertising still accounts for more than 95% of its $201 billion annual revenue.

WhatsApp has begun testing a paid subscription called WhatsApp Plus, offering cosmetic upgrades including chat themes, custom app icons, exclusive ringtones, and expanded pinned chats for approximately EUR 2.49 per month in Europe. The test follows Instagram Plus, which began rolling out in Mexico, Japan, and the Philippines on 30 March with features like anonymous Story viewing and 48-hour Story extension. Together, the two subscriptions represent the first time Meta has offered consumer-facing paid tiers across its messaging and social platforms simultaneously, extending a strategy the company announced on 26 January when it confirmed it would test premium plans across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch that WhatsApp Plus is “designed for users who want more ways to organize and personalize their experience,” adding that the company is “starting with a small test to gather feedback and ensure we’re building something people find genuinely valuable.” The subscription is currently available only to a small fraction of WhatsApp’s 3.3 billion monthly active users, limited to Android beta version 2.26.15.11 in select markets. iOS support is planned for later.

What the money buys

WhatsApp Plus includes 18 new chat themes (from Vibrant Blue and Royal Purple to Forest Green and Fuchsia Pink), 14 alternative app icons, 10 exclusive ringtones, animated sticker packs, and the ability to pin up to 20 chats, compared with three on the free tier. Core messaging, voice and video calls, and end-to-end encryption remain free. The features are, by any honest assessment, largely cosmetic. There is no additional storage, no AI assistant access, and no functional enhancement beyond the pinned chats and custom organisation lists.

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Pricing follows a purchasing-power-adjusted model: EUR 2.49 in Europe, MX$29 (roughly $1.60) in Mexico, and PKR 229 (roughly $0.82) in Pakistan. A one-month free trial is included. The pricing deliberately undercuts competitors. Telegram Premium charges $4.99 per month for features including doubled limits, 4-gigabyte file uploads, voice note transcription, and ad removal. Snapchat+ costs $4 per month for 40-plus exclusive features. WhatsApp Plus costs less and offers less, betting that the sheer size of its user base will compensate for the lower price point.

Instagram Plus, which launched three weeks earlier, offers more functional upgrades: anonymous Story viewing, unlimited audience lists beyond Close Friends, a weekly Spotlight boost, rewatch count insights, 48-hour Story extension, and animated Superlikes. Pricing is similarly region-dependent: MX$39 in Mexico, JPY 319 in Japan, PHP 65 in the Philippines. Neither subscription has been announced for the US or broader European markets.

Why Meta is doing this now

Advertising still accounts for more than 95% of Meta’s revenue, which reached $201 billion in 2025. The company is not in financial distress. But it is spending $115 to $135 billion in capital expenditure this year on AI infrastructure, including a $27 billion joint venture with Nebius for data centres and the integration of Muse Spark, its first model from the Superintelligence Labs. Bank of America projected $7 to $8 billion in annualised savings from the workforce restructuring that begins on 20 May, but even those savings cover only a fraction of the infrastructure bill.

Consumer subscriptions are not going to close that gap on their own. If one percent of WhatsApp’s 3.3 billion users subscribed at the European price, it would generate roughly $1 billion annually. At the Pakistan price, the same conversion rate would produce less than $325 million. These are not transformative numbers for a company earning $201 billion a year. But they represent a diversification away from a business model that depends almost entirely on the attention economy at a moment when AI-driven search and agentic interfaces threaten to reduce the time users spend scrolling feeds where ads are served.

WhatsApp’s paid messaging service for businesses already crossed a $2 billion annualised run rate in the fourth quarter of 2025, growing 54% year over year. The consumer subscription is additive to that existing revenue stream, targeting a different user base with a different value proposition. The business product sells communication infrastructure. WhatsApp Plus sells personalisation.

The regulatory dimension

Meta’s subscription strategy in Europe operates under a specific constraint. The European Commission found in July 2024 that Meta’s “pay or consent” model, which offered users a choice between paying EUR 9.99 per month or consenting to behavioural advertising, violated the Digital Markets Act. The ruling forced Meta to offer a less personalised advertising tier as a free alternative to both tracking and payment.

WhatsApp Plus sidesteps this issue by offering cosmetic features rather than an ad-free experience. WhatsApp does not carry advertising in its messaging interface, so the subscription is not a mechanism for avoiding ads but a premium layer on top of an already ad-free product. The distinction is legally and regulatorily significant: Meta is not conditioning privacy on payment, which was the Commission’s objection, but selling optional customisation to users who want it.

What comes next

Meta acquired the Singapore-based AI agent startup Manus in December 2025 for approximately $2 billion. The company hit $100 million in annualised recurring revenue within eight months of launch, and its technology is being integrated across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Future subscription tiers are likely to incorporate AI features powered by Manus and Muse Spark, moving beyond cosmetic upgrades to functional capabilities such as higher AI generation limits, premium styles for AI-created content, and agentic tools that act on behalf of users.

The current test is deliberately modest. Meta is establishing the subscription infrastructure, testing price elasticity across markets, and gauging whether users will pay for features that have no functional impact on how the app works. If the answer is yes, the company has a framework for layering progressively more valuable features, including AI capabilities, into paid tiers without touching the free core that 3.3 billion people depend on. If the answer is no, the experiment costs Meta almost nothing to run and reveals that its users value WhatsApp precisely because it is simple, free, and universal, qualities that a subscription layer cannot improve upon without undermining.

Mark Zuckerberg said in January that 2026 would be “a year where the AI wave accelerates even further on several fronts.” WhatsApp Plus, with its chat themes and custom icons, is not that acceleration. It is the scaffolding that Meta is building so that when the acceleration arrives, it has a revenue mechanism beyond advertising to capture the value.