This is somewhat incorrect. In Europe (which this is about), Facebook's average revenue per user is about $70 per year (~$6/mo), and in the US it's around $232 (~$19/mo). Taking into account the additional overhead of collecting payments from individual users, support, etc., it's definitely not orders of magnitude away.

All data from Meta's last annual report: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001326801/e574646...

Server costs for images, text, and the occasional video can't be that high per user at Facebook's scale of billions.

But costs for the Rube Goldberg machine of ad hosting, recommendations, bidding, and serving? There's a whole lot of backend infra and middleware behind that. We should assume, at the very least, that ad-free users are cheaper for Facebook (unless they go through all of the backend recommendation processes for all users but simply hide ads from ad-free users). I assume that with some optimization ad-free users ought to be significantly cheaper to serve.

Yes it is most likely to be less but not a factor of 3 simply based on purchasing power alone.

Please don't confuse things. FB users aren't FB's customers. FB doesn't get any money directly from the (on average just a little bit) richer US users.

The delta there shows what that's worth.

I think a lot of people have a mental model based on the size of these companies that they must be making hundreds of dollars a month per user, and it's good to run the numbers to show they don't so society can make more reasonable plans.

Culture may differ, but human brains work the same in the end.

Although the “appropriateness” of the fee may be called into question, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that Facebook will successfully argue that with operating costs of around 6 billion per month, and around 3 billion MAU (i.e. around 2 USD/user), with good SaaS margins expected to be around 80%, a charge of around 10 USD per month is not “inappropriate”, which is almost exactly what they’re charging.

This is not what this is.

It's paying or seeing ads. Tracking is done anyway. For the ads they do still sell on other platforms.

What should really be the case is to have untracked ads as an option instead of targeted ones.

For Facebook is would be either 2% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, or 4% of said revenue.

A bit bigger than a rounding error.

Even when they got close to actually getting a deterring fine, the corrupt Irish DPA bailed them out: https://noyb.eu/en/irish-data-protection-authority-gives-eu-...

Me paying for it, now, that's an interesting proposition.

Personally, I block all the ads and tracking, use a specific browser for whenever I browse facebook under a fake account so paying $10 a month is not worth it to me.

I maybe would pay if it was like $2 but at the same time I don't really use Meta products to actually pay for it. I agree that the price is ridiculously high but at the same time I can't blame them. At least they finally give users a choice, something I never thought would happen.

Of course, this sort of thing happens in basically every other aspect of our lives, but depending on how the law is written it may or may not be legal. For example, the rich can afford safer cars, but there are still minimum safety requirements. Presumably a car company could release a cheap car without seat belts, ABS brakes, etc. The market may like this, but it may not be allowed under the law.

A company may charge whatever they want for non-ad or non-tracking plans, but if they are priced out of the reach of most people, they may not be following intent of the law or how it is written.

Of course there's also the moral argument as well, but I'm guessing you were thinking more of the legal/economic side.