Snapchat jumps on ­subscription-based social media bandwagon with $5.99 monthly fee

Snapchat has jumped on the ­subscription-based social media bandwagon, betting that keen users will pay a monthly fee to access exclusive features.

Snapchat+ was made available to seven million Australian users on Wednesday evening, rolling out at a monthly price of $5.99.

Snapchat has jumped on the ­subscription-based social media bandwagon, hedging its bet that keen users will pay a monthly fee equivalent to a large cup of coffee to access exclusive features.

The new service will allow users to be able to see who has re-watched their stories and pin their BFF (best friend forever) to the top of their friends list as well as see where they have been throughout the day.

Snapchat+ was made available to seven million Australian users on Wednesday evening, rolling out at a monthly price of $5.99. The company’s US-based senior vice-president of product, Jacob Andreou, described the service as a ticket to a semi-­exclusive club with access to pre-release features.

“We’re really excited to be able to use this community of Snapchat+ users as kind of the very first testers for a lot of these really cool new features that we will eventually bring to our broader community,” he said.

People can join the service on six-month ($33.99) or 12-month ($61.99) plans. For that they will be given a Snapchat+ badge, a pinning option for a single friend, insight into who has rewatched their stories and the number of times the story has been rewatched, a ghost trail option which shows where a Snapchat+ user has been, and the ability to change the colour of their Snapchat icon. But there is no promise these features are going to stay.

“Our goal is to really make sure that we continue to evolve this feature set so we’re not even necessarily committed to these six things that we’re talking about today,” Mr Andreou said.

“In fact, we’re really looking to evolve in this offering over time, which means that we’re hoping that every few months, we’re able to continually bring new features and functionality into this group as well as bring pre-­release features because we have some really big stuff planned in the back half of the year.”

Snapchat has introduced a new subscription-based model, in which Australian users can access exclusive features for $5.99 per month.

The arrival of a paid subscription tier arrives late for Snapchat, following in the footsteps of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. Similarly to those platforms, Snapchat+ will only be rolled out in the US, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Despite the new subscription offering – which could generate almost $2bn if all of its global users joined on a monthly subscription – Mr Andreou said the company was not reliant on the service for revenue.

“We actually think that in terms of the real bulk of revenue long term for both the business and for creators in the immediate term for Snapchat is really going to be still focused on the advertising,” he said.

Mr Andreou said Snapchat+ was not aimed at content creators but rather keen users. The features are what Mr Andreou describes as “single-player features”, which means there is no need for the person viewing the snap to be a paid user. Ghost trails, however, remain for plus users only. “Ghost trails isn’t ­really like a precise location trail, we only update someone’s location inside of Snapchat when they actually open the app. We don’t do any background ­location stuff,” he said.

Originally published as Snapchat jumps on ­subscription-based social media bandwagon with $5.99 monthly fee