This week, a message popped up on my wife’s Facebook page. It asked her if she wanted to continue seeing ads on Facebook and Instagram, or whether she would prefer to remove ads by paying a monthly fee. I was intrigued by how much Meta was charging for the ad-free service.
Facebook and Instagram let some users pay to remove ads
Before you get too excited, unless you live in parts of Europe, this isn’t something you can access. For now, at least, the option to pay to opt out of ads on Facebook and Instagram is only available in the UK and EU, along with Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland. For the rest of the world, as things stand, you’re stuck with personalized ads with no option to remove them.
This isn’t a new thing in Europe; the EU, EEA, and Switzerland have had the option of paying for an ad-free experience since November 2023, after the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that Meta needed consent to track users for personalized ads. Meta’s solution was to offer the option of a paid, ad-free version, arguing that by rejecting the ad-free service, users would be giving consent for personalized ads.
The ad-free option has only recently arrived in the UK, however. It started rolling out in September 2025 and is clearly still slowly rolling out, as it only popped up for my wife for the first time this week.
You pay more on mobile
If you’re in a region where this is available and thinking of signing up for the ad-free experience, make sure you do so on the web. If you sign up through the Facebook or Instagram apps, you’ll end up paying more per month. According to Meta, the price of the subscription is higher in the mobile apps “because of the fees that Apple and Google charge through their respective purchasing policies.” If you sign up through the desktop version of Facebook, the price is lower, and it still applies to your mobile app.
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In the UK, the price of the ad-free experience is £2.99 (about $4) per month if you subscribe on the web, or £3.99 per month if you subscribe on Android or iOS. In the EU, the price is €5.99 (around $7) per month on the web or €7.99 per month on Android or iOS.
If you have additional Facebook or Instagram accounts listed in your Accounts Center, an additional fee of £2/€4 per month on the web or £3/€5 per month on mobile will automatically be applied for each additional account.
While not an exact science, the pricing for the ad-free subscription does provide some indication of how much bombarding you with personalized ads is worth to Meta. It’s unlikely that Meta would charge significantly less than it could make in ad revenue.
Interestingly, when the option was first launched in November 2023 in the EU, the price was much higher. The original ad-free subscription was €9.99 (about $12) per month if you signed up on the web, or €12.99 (around $15) if you subscribed through the app. In November 2024, the prices were reduced by about 40% to their current levels.
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It seems likely that the current prices are still enough for Meta to earn a similar amount from a paying user as they would from a free user. If this is the case, then it would appear that the initial pricing in the EU was likely to be more than Meta would earn from targeted ads, meaning that the company was effectively overcharging for the right to remove ads.
At first glance, $4 a month doesn’t seem like a huge amount, but based on Meta’s earnings data, it’s in the right ballpark. In Q1 of 2025, for example, the Average Revenue per Person (ARPP) was around $12, which equates to around $4 per month. While the pricing now seems to be consistent with what Meta would earn from ads, the original EU pricing appears to have been much higher.
When Meta launched the ad-free option in the EU, it used the same “pay or OK” option that is currently available to UK users; either you consent to ads, or you pay the subscription. The European Commission found that this was not compliant with the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which states that users who do not consent must be given access to a “less personalized but equivalent” alternative. After regulatory pressure, Meta was forced to add a third option in November 2024.
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This does not apply in the UK, but users in the EU can now opt to see “less personalized ads.” The grammar pedants among you will realize that this does not mean fewer ads; it means ads that are less personalized. You still see ads, but they will only be based on context, such as what you see in a particular Facebook session and your age, location, and gender, rather than a more detailed personal profile.
While this sounds better, there is a downside. People who select this option may see ads that are unskippable for a few seconds. It seems that despite the EU’s best efforts, you still aren’t able to get a true “less personalized but equivalent” version of Facebook.
In April 2025, Meta was found to have been non-compliant with the DMA rules between November 2023 and November 2024, before the third option was introduced. The company was fined €200 million (around $230 million).
The “pay or OK” model seems to be appearing more and more often. Several websites now offer the choice either to pay or consent to cookies, with no other options available, and Meta is also trialing subscriptions on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp to give access to additional features. As with all social media apps, there is another option you can use to ensure you never see any personalized ads at all: delete your account.
