Snap is working on a premium version of its app called Snapchat Plus.
The paid-for service will give users early access to features.
Screenshots posed by app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi revealed that this could include pinning one Snapchat contact as a “#1 BFF”, changing the Snapchat icon, displaying a badge in your profile, seeing friends’ location over the past 24 hours, and seeing who rewatches Snapchat stories.
Snapchat Plus seems to be priced at 4.59 Euros a month and 45.99 Euros a year (just under £4 for one month or £40 for the year), although it is possible that may change.
“We’re excited about the potential to share exclusive, experimental, and pre-release features with our subscribers, and learn more about how we can best serve our community”, a Snap spokesperson told The Verge.
Snapchat is not the only high-profile technology company that has announced premium versions of their apps. Telegram recently announced that it was working on a subscription model alongside its standard free version.
“After giving it some thought, we realized that the only way to let our most demanding fans get more while keeping our existing features free is to make those raised limits a paid option,” founder Pavel Durov wrote in his channel.
Features could include increased file upload size, faster download speeds, voice-to-text conversion, premium stickers, advanced chat management features.
Twitter is also working on its own premium version called Blue, which will feature the ability to undo tweets and bookmark collections of posts, as well as a reader mode and customisable app icons.
Snapchat, and other apps, have had to make changes since iOS 14 which introduced new privacy features – requiring developers to ask permission before tracking their ads.
“It is not clear yet what the longer term impact of those changes may be for the topline momentum of our business, and this may not be clear until several months or more after the changes are implemented,” Snap chief financial officer Derek Andersen told investors last year.
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