Snapchat announces new monthly subscription – still includes ads

Subscriptions are seemingly the new hotness when it comes to ensuring recurrent user spending. Making someone pay monthly for what would previously have been a single lump sum makes for greater profits in the long term while also ensuring a stronger likelihood of them remaining within your company's ecosystem. It is therefore disappointing yet unsurprising to see Snapchat adding a paid subscription service to its messaging platform.

Making the announcement via The Verge, the Snap team officially unveiled Snapchat Plus. Costing $3.99 a month, this premium tier service is said to be targeted towards “the people who spend most of their time communicating with their closest friends on Snap.”

Though we do not yet know the full long-term plans of this subscription, currently, Snapchat Plus will allow you to change the app’s icon, see who has viewed your Story more than once, and pin a conversation to the top of your chat history.

Focusing on offering early access to new functions, some of the aforementioned Snapchat Plus features could find their way to the free tier eventually, though others decidedly will not. Unfortunately, paying $3.99 a month will not spare you from Snapchat’s abundance of adverts plastered throughout the app’s navigation, with the company’s SVP of Product, Jacob Andreou, claiming that “ads are going to be at the core of our business model for the long term.”

Snapchat isn’t the first previously-free app to later get a subscription service. In fact, it seems as if this is the direction that the entire industry is taking, video games included. Hopefully the obsession towards subscriptions by tech companies subsides soon – though this is unfortunately unlikely.

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KitGuru says: What do you think of Snapchat Plus? Will you pay for it? Are subscriptions inherently bad? Let us know your thoughts down below.

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