Meta Platforms shares have climbed more than 25 percent from an August closing low near $543, reaching $777.59 by late September, a run powered largely by the sudden popularity of its Muse personal AI agent. Muse recently displaced OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the most-downloaded free app on Apple’s U.S. App Store, handing Meta a consumer-facing AI hit that Wall Street sees as a potential gateway to non-advertising revenue.

The subscription stack deepens

The company launched its Meta One consumer plans in late May at prices ranging from $2.99 to $19.99 a month, plus business and creator tiers starting at $14.99 and topping out at $49.99. Meta has since added two higher-priced business plans: Expert at $149 a month and Max at $499 a month, which unlock substantially more human support and the fullest access to the Meta Business Agent. All tiers are now globally available after a phased rollout.

Early numbers remain small but accelerating

Meta reports 15 million combined subscriptions and trials to date, a figure that blends paid users with free trials and carries no price breakdown. At a blended $10 a month, that base would generate roughly $1.8 billion in annual sales, a rounding error against the more than $250 billion in total revenue analysts expect for 2026. Mobile data firm Apptopia, however, captures a sharper inflection: in-app purchase revenue was flat through early September, then jumped on Sept. 9 and stayed elevated. Instagram’s daily average IAP revenue rose 475 percent to $1.2 million from $209,000 over the prior eight weeks; Facebook’s climbed 143 percent to $528,000. The combined incremental lift of about $1.3 million a day annualizes to roughly $475 million, still modest, though Apptopia’s data excludes WhatsApp entirely.

Analysts see a longer runway

BNP Paribas projects Meta’s subscription business could reach $13.5 billion by 2028, while Truist puts the 2030 figure at $20 billion, equivalent to 5.3 percent and 7.9 percent of Meta’s expected 2026 revenue, respectively. The gap between today’s run-rate and those targets is wide, but the September spike suggests the rollout is moving past the purely theoretical stage. What to watch next is whether the Muse-driven traffic converts into durable paid subscriptions across all three apps, or whether the early surge proves to be a one-time curiosity bump.