- Instagram Plus is now rolling out globally
- It costs $3.99 (roughly £3 / AU$5.60) per month
- It includes new and improved features, with everything that was previously free remaining so — at least for now
Following an announcement last month, Instagram Plus is now rolling out globally, giving you the opportunity to pay a monthly subscription to use a platform you previously accessed for free.
Of course, the free tier is still available and — for now at least — includes everything it always did, with the ‘Plus’ version adding things on top.
For $3.99 (roughly £3 / AU$5.60) per month, Instagram Plus gives you ‘Story Spotlight’, which lets you give your story priority for your friends, ‘Super Hearts’, which are animated hearts you can send, the ability to create as many story audience lists as you want, and the ability to make a story last for 48 hours, rather than the standard 24.
You can also preview stories, see how many times your stories were rewatched, quickly check if a specific person has viewed your story, and post to your profile or highlights without it appearing in friends' feeds.
On the customization side, you can choose from a selection of app icons, customize the font of your profile bio, and pin up to six posts to your profile (up from three previously).
A troubling future
All of this is new, so you don’t lose anything by not paying, and you still have to deal with adverts even if you do pay.
But of course, things could change — it’s possible that, in the future, Meta will let you pay to remove ads (as users can already separately do in the UK and EU), but it’s also possible that features that are currently free will one day be added to Instagram Plus.
And if nothing else, it's likely that most upcoming Instagram features will be placed behind the Instagram Plus paywall.
Those possibilities — along with a concept of paying for an app that has always been free, even if that’s fully optional for now — have been met with an understandably unhappy response from users.
Under a previous TechRadar article covering Instagram Plus and a possible pay-to-engage future, responses included “talk about pricing yourself out of business”, “let it be their undoing”, and “I won’t be paying”, among other, mostly negative comments.
So, it will be interesting to see whether Instagram Plus will actually prove successful for Meta, and whether the company will leave the free features alone indefinitely and continue improving the free tier, or whether Instagram will increasingly become an app you need to pay to use properly.
