Various social media companies have been toying with the idea of launching a subscription-based service that will give their users additional fun features on their platforms and more importantly generate additional revenue for these companies. Last year, microblogging platform Twitter debuted its subscription plan Twitter Blue in Canada and Australia before expanding into the US and New Zealand. Quite recently, instant messaging platform Telegram, known to be giving Mark Zuckerberg’s WhatsApp a run for its money, announced a paid premium tier for users. By subscribing to this, Telegram users will be able to send files as large as 4GB (it was previously 2GB), and enjoy faster downloads, among other things. They also will be able to follow up to a thousand channels, twice more than what free users are entitled to, and create up to 20 chat folders with as many as 200 chats in each of them. Snapchat has also launched a paid subscription plan!
Snapchat has launched its paid subscription plan called Snapchat plus. This paid subscription plan will offer users exclusive features such as the ability to change the app icon and see people that viewed your stories more than once.
The company first announced that it was testing a paid subscription plan earlier this month but failed to provide details. Now that the launch is official, Snapchat plus will launch first in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates. It will eventually be rolled out to more countries. Snapchat will be charging $3.99 monthly for the plan.
In its announcement, Snapchat said that “Today we’re launching Snapchat+, a collection of exclusive, experimental, and pre-release features available in Snapchat for $3.99/month. This subscription will allow us to deliver new Snapchat features to some of the most passionate members of our community and allow us to provide prioritized support.”
Depending on patronage and how fast it catches on, the new subscription plan will help Snapchat create a new revenue stream, hit its target, and make some recovery from the effects of the Russian-Ukraine war.
In an interview, the company’s Senior Vice President of Product Jacob Andreou reiterated that “ads are going to be at the core of our business model for the long term” and the company doesn’t expect the new subscription service to be a “material new revenue source.”
