First came the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Then came the news Snapchat is constructing a paywall around Memories.
The company announced last week that it’s capping users free Memories storage at 5GB. Those who have spent the better part of a decade cultivating massive personal archives on the app will now be forced to either export those Memories or sign up for one of Snapchat’s new Memories Storage plans in order to preserve them.
The promise of free unlimited storage has been a big part of Snapchat’s identity. For many, it has long served as something of a time capsule, where users could store and revisit old Snaps long after they expired from the app’s ephemeral main feed.
In the US, storage plan costs will be $1.99 a month for 100GB of storage, 250GB with a Snapchat+ subscription, or 5TB with Snapchat Platinum. If users exceed the limit but choose not to sign up for a plan, their oldest Snaps will be saved. The most recent ones, however, will be deleted to stay within the storage limit.
The news that users will soon have to pay for what they had long enjoyed for free was met with backlash online.
“The only reason I have snapchat in my phone is bcs it stores all the memories, i had no idea snapchat would betray us like that,” one X user wrote. “Just ordered a usb stick so i can transfer 10 years worth of snapchat memories onto it,” another added.
An online petition with almost 9,000 signatures at the time of writing dubbed the charge a “memory tax”, pointing to the declining availability and affordability of physical media in an increasingly digitized world. For the “buy everything, own nothing” generation, an ever-mounting number of subscription fees are increasingly required to access everything from their own data and memories, to music and movies.
“Funny how i had to explain to my mom, 2 days ago, that you can’t buy music anymore because they’ve [put] subscriptions in place for us to pay for the rest of our life, until we die,” one TikTok user wrote. “And now I hve to transfer all my Snapchat memories from my teenage years on a hard drive.”
While most social media platforms don’t charge for data storage (yet), Snapchat Memories can be positioned more like a personal photo album than a public profile. Companies like Apple and Google, which are also commonly used for photo storage, all currently charge for cloud storage once a user reaches a limit.
High stakes for Snapchat
For many loyal Snapchat users, the stakes are high. Users have saved more than 1 trillion “Memories” since the feature was launched in 2016, according to Team Snapchat.
“It’s never easy to transition from receiving a service for free to paying for it, but we hope the value we provide with Memories is worth the cost,” the company said in a news release last week. “Thank you for trusting us with some of your most precious moments. These changes will allow us to continue to invest in making Memories better for our entire community.”
For those unwilling to pay, they are left with two options to rescue their Memories from deletion. First is to manually download Snapchat Memories to the camera roll. This is limited to batches of 100 at a time, which can be a gargantuan taks if users have years worth of saved Snaps.
Another option is to use Snapchat’s “Download My Data” tool to save the Memories archive and have it emailed over in a .zip file.
Either way, the company has given users with more than 5 GB of Memories one year to upgrade before the storage limits come into effect.