Bluesky’s teases paid subscription, Bluesky+, in new mockup

Social networking startup and X competitor Bluesky is working on subscriptions. The company first announced plans to develop a new revenue stream based on the subscription model when detailing its $15 million Series A back in October. Now, mockups teasing the upcoming Bluesky subscription, along with a list of possible features, have been published to Bluesky’s GitHub.

Though the company warns on GitHub that the list here is a user interface mockup only and the paid features could very well change ahead of launch, there’s reason to believe that at least some of these are under consideration for Bluesky’s premium subscription.

When earlier discussing its subscription model this past fall, Bluesky said in a blog post it would offer premium features like “higher quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames.” Both of those features are now included in the user interface mockup of the subscription currently known as Bluesky+.

In addition, the placeholder text in the mockup indicates Bluesky could be considering other paid features, like custom app icons, a Bluesky+ profile badge, inline post translations, post analytics, and bookmark folders — a feature set that could rival X.

Of most interest is that Bluesky+ could be weighing offering verification (profile badges) as part of its subscription, unless that feature is also only placeholder text as opposed to an idea Bluesky is developing. However, the company recently spoke about its plans for verification and how the open nature of its network could make its system work a lot differently than paid verification on X and Meta’s platforms. While that may be true, it would be interesting if Bluesky still decided to put its verification tools behind a paywall of sorts.

The mockup also shows pricing of $8 per month or $72 per year for Bluesky+, but that is not final, either.

The user interface mockup was spotted by Bluesky user @saeri.xyz, whose post about the finding ended up seeing hundreds of likes, quotes, and reposts on the emerging social network, which now has 24.7 million users.

Bluesky software engineer Dan Abramov, who previously worked on React and Redux at Meta, responded in the thread to caution Bluesky users that the list of features shown in the UI mockup “doesn’t necessarily match what will be released.”

“Some of these are likely to make it, but please don’t take this as an actual list of planned features,” he wrote in his reply on Bluesky. “We’ll announce the actual list when more work is done.”

Abramov also clarified that the “coming soon” label means nothing, as it’s just a test of the UI treatment for upcoming features.

Despite the warning that nothing here was final, Bluesky users were eager to discuss the possibilities of a Bluesky subscription, with some criticizing the proposed paid features and others suggesting different features they’d like to see in a subscription, among other things.

Subscriptions aren’t the only model Bluesky is considering. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber recently pointed to other efforts, like selling domain names, a marketplace of algorithms, and even potentially selling ads, as other things the company could consider to help it make money.

Bluesky was asked for further comment, and we’ll update this story if we hear back.