Parents of Snapchat fans could be on the hook for another expensive recurring subscription, as the company behind the app has announced mandatory cloud storage plans for its popular Memories feature.

The youth-focused social media app has always been free to use, implementing advertisements and in-app purchases for monetisation. But the impending change will mean that storing your previously shared content in the cloud, which is currently free, will come with a monthly fee.

Snap said users would be able to store up to 5GB of Memories for free.

Users paying $6 a month for Snapchat+ will be able to store up to 250GB, while those paying $16 a month for Snapchat Platinum will be able to store up to 5TB. Snap plans to introduce a lower-cost option that allows 100GB of storage, but has not announced Australian pricing.

Another monthly expense for parents

For Australian parents, the subscription could become one more monthly expense their teens demand, on top of music and video streaming services, cloud storage for their phone or computer, and gaming subscriptions, all of which have been rising in cost over recent years.

Of course, in Australia, some of those young users will be kicked off Snapchat entirely once the social media ban for under-16s comes into effect in December.

When Snapchat launched 14 years ago, it was designed to be ephemeral. You can use it to take photos and videos (which the app calls Snaps), avoiding your phone’s built-in camera roll.

You can send Snaps to friends, in which case they’ll self-delete after being viewed, or post them to your story, where they’ll remain visible to your friends for 24 hours.

But in 2016 Snapchat introduced Memories, which is a way to save Snaps you create to your own personal cloud storage, for viewing or reuse later.

Snap said the vast majority of users currently have less than 5GB of Memories stored, and so will not need to pay anything.

But the latest change is likely to hit the app’s most ardent users, overwhelmingly teens and young adults.

What are users saying

Some users reacting to the change online said they had been using Memories as free cloud storage to avoid taking up precious space on their phones or paying for storage from Google or Apple.

“When I was in high school we used Snapchat every day. We had multiple conversations, selfies, videos taken in class, at events,” said one user on Reddit.

“We took a lot of selfies, and storage wasn’t a problem because we had Snapchat Memories.”

A single photo Snap can be as small as one megabyte, but video Snaps longer than two minutes can easily exceed 100 megabytes. So users who have been taking advantage of the free storage for years are likely to already be past the 5GB limit (one gigabyte is 1000 megabytes).

Snap said it would allow users to store content exceeding their allowance for 12 months, which presumably means it will be deleted after that point. Therefore, users with more than 5GB of Memories have a year from now to pay up, move their content elsewhere or lose it.

What to do if you don’t want to pay

So what can users do if they’re concerned about losing access to their Snapchat Memories? They could pay Snap for the storage, which is likely the easiest but most expensive solution. Or they could go to accounts.snapchat.com and request to download their data, which will include all of their Memories.

These could be stored in a safe place or go to another cloud storage system like iCloud or Google Photos. You may already be paying for this, or may be able to include it in a plan that covers the whole family.

Users looking to avoid hitting the 5GB limit in the future will need to be more judicious about what they save to Memories. The Snapchat app has an option to save content to the camera roll as you take it, which could again be backed up with a Google or Apple cloud plan. Both companies offer storage plans to cover a family of five, at $4.50 a month for 200GB or $15 a month for 2TB.

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