Bluesky, the social media platform that everyone is buzzing about, is currently working on a paid add-on feature that would be available to users via a monthly subscription. On GitHub, the Bluesky team is experimenting with add-ons for which users would pay access. These include a profile badge, analytics, longer video uploads, and additional customization for profiles.
Currently, the add-on mockups are priced at $8 (€7.50) per month or $72 per year (€68) for Bluesky+, but these rates could change.
Bluesky began in 2019 as a research initiative at Twitter, now called X, and became an independent company in 2021. Bluesky was launched to find a way to remain free to end users without using advertising and has said it does not want to “require selling user data for ads” for monetization. The platform is developing the AT Protocol to create a Web3-based Internet and is comparable in many ways to Mastodon.
In the past few months, Bluesky has seen more than 500 percent in increased usage and sits in the top 10 free Social Media apps on the App Store as of December 2024. It now has 20 million global users, a huge step from its 9 million global users from back in September.