Snapchat announced their subscription plan, Snapchat+, today. It’s going to cost $3.99 a month and provides access to beta and experimental features. Between reporting by Axios and the Verge, the known features are: changing the app icon, pin a conversation as “BFF,” see who rewatched stories and other content, display a badge on your profile, and seeing friends map location for 24 hours (“Ghost trails”).

My take: A product VP told the Verge: there aren’t expectations for Plus to become a “material new revenue source.” I find this bizarre, feels like CYA, and an out: “if it doesn’t work out, we didn’t have high expectations”. Snapchat feels the pain of ads becoming less valuable over time, and this is likely a bet to see if a subscription product can work. This feels very similar to Twitter Blue, which I used for a few months, but found pretty useless. But even Twitter Blue had features that sounded like killer or at least interesting features on paper (undo tweet, NFT pfp). To be fair, I don’t use Snapchat a lot, but these don’t seem like valuable features, and I don’t expect teenagers to pay for them.

Also, I feel like + branding is overplayed.