Snapchat has announced that it will begin charging users who want to keep old photos and videos saved on the app, a move that has sparked backlash online.
The popular social media platform introduced its Memories feature in 2016, allowing people to store posts that would normally disappear after 24 hours. But the company now says anyone with more than 5 gigabytes (GB) of saved Memories will need to pay to keep them.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Snapchat’s parent company Snap said, “These changes will allow us to continue to invest in making Memories better for our entire community.” It admitted that “it’s never easy to transition from receiving a service for free to paying for it” but insisted the new plans would be “worth the cost.”
Snap said more than one trillion Memories have been saved by users since the feature was introduced almost a decade ago.
According to TechCrunch, the new storage plans will start at $1.99 (about N3,200) per month for 100GB. A higher plan offering 250GB will be included in the $3.99 (about N6,000) Snapchat+ subscription.
The company also said users who exceed the free 5GB limit will be given 12 months of temporary storage and can download their content to personal devices if they do not want to pay.
Snap stressed that the change will not affect most users since “the vast majority of Snapchatters” have less than 5GB of saved Memories.
Still, many users have taken to social media to criticise the decision, describing it as “greedy” and “unfair.” Some complained they had used Snapchat’s free storage for years and built up large collections of content, meaning they now face heavy costs to keep them.
Drew Benvie, CEO of social media consultancy Battenhall, said the move reflects a wider trend. “The road to paying for storage on social media is inevitable. In an era where we post less but save more, this is an evolution of messaging and social media platforms,” he told BBC News.
Snapchat, which said in April that it now has over 900 million monthly users, is competing with rivals like Instagram and TikTok, which boast billions of active users.
