What is left of AOL in 2026?
More than most people assume, and none of it is dial-up. AOL runs a free webmail service, a news and lifestyle portal, and a set of paid subscription plans that renew every month.
When Bending Spoons agreed to buy the company on October 29, 2025, it put AOL's audience at roughly 8 million daily active users and 30 million monthly active users, and described AOL as one of the ten most-used email providers in the world. That is the asset. Not the brand, not the discs, the mailboxes.
The modem handshake is the part that ended. AOL switched off dial-up internet access on September 30, 2025 and retired the AOL Dialer and AOL Shield software the same day. Email, the portal and the paid plans all survived that cut.
What has changed since is ownership, staffing and price, in that order. All three happened inside nine months, and all three are the reason the AOL of late 2026 is a different company from the AOL of 2025.
Who owns AOL now?
AOL is owned by Bending Spoons, a Milan-based software company that buys aging internet products and rebuilds them on shared infrastructure. The same firm owns Evernote, Vimeo, Meetup, Eventbrite and WeTransfer.
The deal was announced on October 29, 2025, funded alongside a $2.8 billion debt package arranged with lenders including Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and BNP Paribas, and reported at roughly $1.5 billion. It closed on January 2, 2026, when Bending Spoons took over AOL Holdco I LLC.
The seller was Apollo Global Management, the private equity firm that bought Yahoo, AOL brand included, from Verizon for $5 billion in 2021. Verizon had paid about $4.4 billion for AOL alone in 2015, so AOL changed hands in 2026 for roughly a third of its price eleven years earlier, and for a rounding error against the AOL Time Warner merger of 2001.
Chief executive Luca Ferrari framed it as a permanent purchase rather than a flip. "Bending Spoons has never sold an acquired business," he said in the October 2025 announcement. In July 2026 Bending Spoons listed its own shares on Nasdaq under the ticker BSP, so AOL now sits inside a publicly traded company for the first time since 2015.
What happened to AOL staff after the sale?
They were cut, quickly and in public filings. On February 17, 2026, six weeks after the deal closed, AOL notified Virginia state officials and Fairfax County that 108 workers tied to its office at 11955 Democracy Drive in Reston would lose their jobs, about 94 of them on March 1 and the remaining 14 on May 31.
Bending Spoons defended the cuts by pointing at its other purchases. Reducing organizational complexity "leads to faster and more efficient product development," the company told Virginia Business in 2026, arguing that a leaner AOL would serve "its loyal customer base with greater focus and agility." A company spokesperson said departing staff were offered separation packages "exceeding industry standards."
The scale of that pattern shows up in the company's own registration statement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Bending Spoons added about 1,830 full-time staff through the AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo acquisitions, and told investors that once those transformations finish later in 2026, only a few hundred of those people are expected to remain.
What does an AOL subscription cost in 2026?
AOL Desktop Gold, the paid browser and mail client most subscribers actually use, is listed at $9.99 a month on AOL's own product page, with a 30-day free trial. Ad-Free AOL Mail, which strips paid ads out of the webmail inbox, is listed separately at $4.99 a month.
That $9.99 is new. Desktop Gold was advertised at $6.99 a month earlier in 2026. AOL raised membership pricing from June 25, 2026 and chose not to publish a plain price list, telling customers instead that each subscriber would get an email about their own plan 30 days before renewal, with the option to cancel first.
For the money, Desktop Gold bundles anti-keylogging and screen-grab protection, anti-phishing tools, mail filtering that gathers every attachment from a sender in one place, two-step verification, encryption of data stored in the client, and phone or chat support advertised around the clock.
None of it includes internet access. An AOL subscription in 2026 is software, security and a phone number to call, sold to people who have used the same interface since the Clinton administration. That is also why the business was worth $1.5 billion: the plans renew quietly and the customers rarely leave.
Why did AOL switch off dial-up in 2025?
AOL announced in August 2025 that dial-up would end on September 30 of that year. The company said only that it "routinely evaluates its products and services" and had decided to discontinue dial-up internet access.
Demand had drained away decades earlier. CNN Business reported at the time that U.S. Census Bureau data for 2023 counted about 163,401 American households relying on dial-up alone to get online, across every provider, not just AOL.
The technology had also stopped being usable. A dial-up connection topped out near 56 kilobits per second in ideal conditions, and Tom's Hardware calculated in 2025 that an average modern web page of about 3 megabytes would take 20 to 30 minutes to arrive over one. The gap between that and a phone on 5G is covered in the math on how slow 56k really was.
Shutting it down also removed the last reason AOL needed telephone infrastructure. What remains is a software business with a 1990s brand attached.
Can you still get dial-up internet anywhere?
Yes, just not from AOL. NetZero still advertises a free ad-supported dial-up tier capped at 10 hours a month, and EarthLink has listed dial-up at $9.95 a month for an introductory period and $24.95 a month afterward.
So the technology survives in 2026 as a niche product for addresses outside broadband coverage, sold by companies that never built their identity on it the way AOL did. The full list of who still sells it is in the rundown on where dial-up is still available.
AOL's other 1990s assets did not all reach this point. AOL Instant Messenger was shut down in 2017, and the AOL Time Warner content empire was broken up and sold in pieces across the 2000s and 2010s. Email is the one thing that kept compounding, because changing an email address is genuinely annoying and most people never get around to it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is AOL Mail still free in 2026?
Yes. AOL Mail is still free in 2026, with ads in the inbox, and it does not require a paid AOL plan. AOL sells Ad-Free AOL Mail at $4.99 a month for people who want the ads gone, and the paid Desktop Gold plan at $9.99 a month adds security software and live support rather than access to the mailbox.
Can you still get AOL dial-up internet?
No. AOL ended dial-up internet access on September 30, 2025 and retired the AOL Dialer and AOL Shield software with it. Other providers including NetZero and EarthLink still sell dial-up in 2026, so the technology exists, just not under the AOL brand.
How much does AOL cost a month?
AOL Desktop Gold is listed at $9.99 a month in 2026 with a 30-day free trial, up from $6.99 earlier in the year after AOL raised membership prices from June 25, 2026. Ad-Free AOL Mail is $4.99 a month, and a basic AOL Mail account with ads costs nothing.