On mobile, Meta reportedly plans to charge €13 per month ($13.6) for the ad-free access to one account, either Facebook or Instagram.

However, if you’re more like the other 98.5% of people who prefer to use phones or tablets to access social media, you’ll have to fork over even more. That means $17 to use both Instagram and Facebook on the desktop. And if you want to use both Facebook and Instagram on your desktop (which would mean you’re in the absolute minority since only about 1.5% of people use Facebook on their desktop or laptop, while 98.5% use it on mobile devices), you’ll have to shell out extra $6.30 (€6) for an additional account. Something does not add upĪccording to the report, Meta has informed the EU’s privacy watchdog in Ireland and digital competition regulators in Brussels that it wants to charge EU users a $10.5 (€10) monthly fee for using a single Facebook or Instagram account on desktop without ads.

So let’s cut to the chase, and dive right into the numbers. The prices are not cheap, in fact they are so high that it seems pretty obvious to us that Meta never intended to offer a fair deal to its users. With the new Wall Street Journal report revealing how much these ad-free subscription tiers could actually cost, we had far fewer doubts about whether Meta’s offer was genuine or not: it wasn’t. Rather, we felt it was more of a token gesture to placate the increasingly aggressive (and rightly so) EU privacy regulators challenging its data-hungry practices. And while we were happy to be proven wrong, we also had a nagging feeling that Meta was not serious about giving users a real choice between seeing ads and paying a reasonable fee. At the time, we were still waiting for details on how much Meta would charge for the great privilege of watching user-generated content without interruptions. As much as we wanted to, it was impossible to take the news of Meta’s paid offering at face value, given that ad tracking has always been at the heart of the company’s business model. When reports first surfaced that Meta was launching paid ad-free tiers for Instagram and Facebook in the EU, we were skeptical, to say the least.

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