Sources: BeReal is exploring adding paid features to avoid advertising; the app now has 15M DAUs, up from 10K in March 2021, and is now valued at ~$600M
Photo-sharing app BeReal is exploring the addition of in-app payments for extra features to avoid Instagram-style advertising … Tweets: @cristinacriddle Tweets: Cristina Criddle / @cristinacriddle : I've been digging into BeReal, this summer's hottest social app. It promotes itself through paying students to plug it at frat parties with free merch, and is considering paid features. My piece with @akilalalalaa and @tim 🤳📸 https://www.ft.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
BeReal's growth has been explosive but monetization-free: from 10K DAUs in March 2021 to 7.9M by July 2022 and now a reported 15M+, with a $60M Series B at a ~$600M valuation closed earlier this year ($60M Series B). The FT report says the app is exploring paid features specifically to avoid becoming an Instagram-style ad business.
What makes the choice consequential is how the corpus resolves it: within two years BeReal opened the door to brands and celebrities joining the platform, and after Voodoo acquired it for €500M it rolled out in-feed ads in the US. The paid-features experiment was the fork in the road, and the later coverage shows which path won.
First-order effects
- Users would face a direct trade-off between paying for extra features and keeping the app free, replacing the implicit deal of an ad-free feed with an explicit price tag.
- Instagram is the named counter-model: BeReal's positioning depends on not replicating the ad-supported feed its users are fleeing.
Second-order effects
- If paid features fund the app, pressure to admit advertisers eases — but the later decision to let brands and celebrities in shows the alternative revenue path BeReal ultimately took when subscriptions alone didn't close the gap.
- A working subscription layer would set a template other anti-ad social apps could copy, shifting competition from ad inventory to willingness-to-pay among Gen Z users who make up most of the base.
Third-order effects
- The arc from 'no ads' to Voodoo's €500M acquisition and US in-feed ads suggests structural convergence: consumer social apps that scale past tens of millions of users tend to end up selling attention regardless of founding positioning.
- If subscription-first models keep failing at scale, expect new social entrants to plan brand content and ads into their roadmaps from day one rather than treating them as a betrayal to be deferred.
The trend: Anti-advertising social apps are converging back on ads and brand content as they scale, with subscriptions serving as a transitional monetization experiment rather than an endpoint.