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Social networking startup Bluesky and competitor X are working on subscriptions. The company first announced plans to develop a new revenue stream based on a subscription model when detailing its $15 million Series A in October. Now, mockups have been created to tease Bluesky’s upcoming subscription, along with a list of potential features It’s published on Bluesky’s GitHub.
Despite the company warns On GitHub the list here is a UI mockup only and that the paid features could change well before launch, there is reason to believe that at least some of them are under consideration for Bluesky’s premium subscription.
When we previously discussed its subscription model last fall, Bluesky said: Blog post It will offer premium features like “high-quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames.” These two features are now included in the subscription UI model currently known as Bluesky+.
Additionally, placeholder text in the mockup indicates that Bluesky may consider other paid features, such as custom app icons, a Bluesky+ profile badge, built-in post translations, post analytics, and bookmark folders — a feature set that could rival X.
What’s even more interesting is that Bluesky+ could consider offering verification (profile badges) as part of its subscription, unless this feature is also just placeholder text rather than an idea that Bluesky is developing. However, the company recently talked about its plans for verification and how the open nature of its network could make its system work much differently than paid verification on the X and Meta platforms. While this may be true, it would be interesting if Bluesky decided to put its verification tools behind a paywall of some sort.
The model also shows a price of $8 per month or $72 per year for Bluesky+, but that’s not final either.
The UI mockup was spotted by a Bluesky user @saeri.xyzwhose post about the results ended up seeing hundreds of likes, quotes and reposts on the emerging social network, which is now 24.7 million Users.
Bluesky Software Engineer Dan Abramoff, from previously worked on reaction and Revitalization In the Meta, a response in the thread warns Bluesky users that the list of features shown in the UI mockup “does not necessarily match what will be released.”
“It’s possible some of these will work, but please don’t consider them an actual list of planned features,” he wrote in his response to Bluesky. “We will announce the actual list when further work is completed.”
Abramov also explained that the “coming soon” label doesn’t mean anything, as it’s just a test of the UI processing for upcoming features.
Despite the caveat that nothing is final here, Bluesky users were eager to discuss the possibilities of the Bluesky subscription, with some criticizing the proposed paid features and others suggesting various features they would like to see in the subscription, among other things.
Subscriptions aren’t the only model Bluesky is considering. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber recently pointed to other efforts, such as selling domain names, an algorithmic marketplace, and even potentially selling ads, as other things the company could consider to help it make money.
Bluesky has been asked for further comment, and we will update this story if we hear back.
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