A Quarter of Muse Shoppers Average Over $200 a Purchase. Meta Wants a Cut From the Seller.

More than a quarter of the people shopping through Muse are averaging over $200 a purchase. That number came from Mark Zuckerberg on Meta's third quarter earnings call Wednesday, where he said shopping is now the most common thing people do with Muse, Meta's personal AI agent. Muse has passed 10 million users since it rolled out in early September, and it is still only available in the US and Canada.

Zuckerberg also said what Meta intends to do about those $200 baskets. The company will build "commerce tools" that let it charge businesses a fee on the transactions the agent completes. The free assistant that books your travel and orders your stuff is going to start taking a cut from the merchant on the other end of it. Heavier users, business owners included, will get asked to pay a subscription.

From launching it to scaling it

Zuckerberg said Muse has "clear product market fit," which is why Meta is "entering a new phase," one he described as "a more operational phase that is focused on scaling it." He said Meta expects "to grow Muse to serve billions of people," and that it is building out enough compute to serve more than a billion of them over the next few years. About a quarter of the people who set Muse up use it every day.

Scale matters more here than it would for another Meta app, because Muse costs real money every time you use it. It is a lot more expensive to run than Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp. Zuckerberg called it "very compute-intensive" in the near term and said Meta expects to improve its cost efficiency by more than 10x over the next year. An agent that spins up a machine and goes shopping for you is not a feed you can serve for a fraction of a cent.

Where the money is supposed to come from

The plan has two halves. Most people keep Muse free and Meta takes a percentage of the commerce running through it. Power users who want the newest models or more tokens pay a subscription, as do businesses that want extra features. CFO Susan Li was plain about where that stands today: "Today, we are not monetizing Muse outside of subscriptions." The transaction fees are the part Meta still has to build.

For comparison, Zuckerberg said Meta earns several hundred dollars a year per American user across its existing apps, and he expects Muse to reach a higher level than that over time, driven by the commerce already happening on it. He also name-checked Plaid, which supplies the connector Muse uses to reach payment apps and bank accounts: "Plaid told us that they hadn't seen activity like they're seeing with their connector on any other service before."

Taking a cut of a sale is a normal way to run a business. It is how Amazon, the App Store, Shopify and every travel site you have ever booked through make their money. Meta also deserves credit for saying it out loud on a public call, with numbers attached, instead of letting it surface six months from now in a developer policy update nobody reads.

The question Meta didn't answer

An agent that earns a fee when a merchant closes the sale is a different product from an agent that only helps you buy a jacket. Ask Muse for the best wireless earbuds under $150 and it has to pick one. If some of the sellers it could pick are paying Meta and some are not, you want to know which is which. Meta has not said how it will keep the fee side away from the recommendation side, whether paying merchants get any advantage in what Muse suggests, or whether you will be able to tell when a suggestion carries a commission. Meta has said it does not feed Muse conversations to its ad systems, which is a promise about a different problem.

The timing does not help. Muse has spent the past few weeks in the news for handing a seller's home address to a buyer, and for putting chat titles in shared web addresses, which made thousands of conversations findable. Neither of those is about money. Both are reasons to want the specifics before you let the thing spend $200 for you.

On your face next month

Zuckerberg called Muse "central" to making more money from Meta's AI glasses, and said Meta does not make a large profit on the hardware itself. The glasses sell the subscription. Muse was previewed on them at Connect last month and arrives "next month," which means November. You will be able to talk to it the way you talk to Meta AI now, check on tasks it is running for you, and add things to a to-do list.

Whether any of that costs extra on top of the glasses, Meta has not said. Zuckerberg's framing, that the hardware barely earns anything and Muse is what sells subscriptions, points toward some of it sitting behind a paywall. That is a read of his remarks, not an announcement.

The quarter itself went well. Meta beat revenue expectations and announced a 2-for-1 stock split. Next quarter, watch whether the commerce tools ship, and what Meta says about keeping a paying merchant and a good recommendation apart.