Meta will launch its AI agent for the consumer market within a few weeks, and is considering a subscription of up to for the premium version $199.99 per month. The figure is worth it 25 times the $7.99 that the company has been asking for three months for access to its chatbot. The product is called Hatch in the internal documents reconstructed by The Informationwhich took the times and price list hypotheses out of it; the final price is not yet set.
Meta trained the agent to reach services that its users already frequent: DoorDash, Etsy, Reddit, Yelp And Microsoft Outlook. The goal is for the user to never leave the app, and for ordering, purchasing, reading reviews, and managing email to all happen in the same place. The first prototypes also show a panel with tools that the agent has built for those who use it, for example a physical activity log or a travel itinerary, as Ryan Merket reported on RuntimeWire working on the same documents.
During development Hatch turned on Claude Opus 4.6 And Claude Sonnet 4.6and Meta plans to move it to its own Muse Spark before launch. A new model called. is expected in October Watermelonof which The Information was unable to establish whether it will be released within the Muse family or under its own name. The release pace remains fast: Muse Spark 1.2 and the terminal agent Muse Code arrived on August 5, and five days later Muse Glimmer, an open-weight model with 30 billion parameters, followed.
A package around software that is already free
OpenClawthe open source personal agent that Hatch responds to, costs nothing: it runs on the machine of whoever installs it and manages mail, calendars and other services through messaging apps. Setting it up, however, is not easy, because it requires command line work and a series of choices about models, credentials and permissions. This is exactly the part that Meta aims to sell already packaged, together with the underlying infrastructure.
Running agents at scale costs: Peter Steinbergerthe creator of OpenClaw, has racked up a bill of 1.3 million dollars per month in tokens. Internal plans describe the paid tier as Hatch Pluswith a daily capacity of five to ten times that of the free product and quotas that are reset to zero at each billing cycle, again according to RuntimeWire’s reconstruction. Read with those numbers next to it, the figure seems more like the price of an amount of computing sold per month than the fee for an assistant.
In the second quarter Meta made money 60.8 billion dollarsof which 59.36 billion from advertising, approximately 98% of the total. For the current year the company plans capital investments between 130 and 145 billionincluding finance lease payments, nearly double last year at the midpoint of the range. A subscription must not replace advertising to weigh, but it seems to have to generate revenues that grow together with the calculation consumed, something that advertising revenue does not do. Mark Zuckerberg he wrote on August 10: Meta will build personal agents for billions of people, offer free versions and charge those who want more computing power.
WhatsApp open to agents of other companies
Meta is building a function within WhatsApp that allows you to connect and communicate with agents developed by other companies, and a limited release could start as early as this week. The two moves together give the company two positions at once: sell its own agent and turn WhatsApp into the place where other people’s agents reach the public. The second seems to be worth more than the first, because distribution survives any single product.
In Europe, WhatsApp is the default messaging application in most countries, and it is the surface that Meta is converting into an agent platform. An agent who buys, books and reads mail passing through there touches the ground on which European regulators have already questioned the company, i.e. the cross-referencing of data between its services. The available information says nothing about this: neither how Hatch will process that data, nor whether the product will arrive in the European Union, where Meta has in the past withheld functions while it clarified the rules.
