Snapchat rankled a few of its most loyal (and heavy) customers when it introduced final week it’s going to start charging for storage plans for Recollections, its model of a digital archive for Snaps and tales.
Though the Santa Monica, California-based social media firm promised that “nothing will change” for the overwhelming majority of Snapchatters—who’ve lower than 5 gigabytes (GB) of Recollections—it’s going to start rolling out paid storage plans at a but undisclosed date.
A Snapchat spokesperson advised Quick Firm {that a} 100 GB storage plan will price $1.99 monthly, with costs various by market and native foreign money. The corporate additionally advised TechCrunch that plans will vary as much as $15.99 monthly, relying on the quantity of knowledge of Recollections. The corporate indicated you would have 1000’s of Snaps saved earlier than you’re bumped right into a paid plan.
However there’s a work-around: You’ll be able to obtain your knowledge without cost. Right here’s what that you must know if you wish to obtain your Snapchat knowledge.
Methods to save your Snapchat Recollections
The recognition of the Recollections function, which was launched by Snapchat in 2016, will now come at a value. The corporate stated that customers have saved greater than 1 trillion Recollections since 2016, which is why it’s rolling out the storage plans.
“It’s by no means straightforward to transition from receiving a service without cost to paying for it, however we hope the worth we offer with Recollections is price the associated fee,” the corporate stated in a weblog put up final week.
Whereas Snapchat will present 12 months of momentary Recollections storage for any Recollections that exceed the 5 GB storage restrict, it hasn’t specified when that free interval will start.
That’s why it’s possible you’ll need to be proactive should you actually need to dangle onto some Recollections and obtain them to your machine now.
Fortunately, that’s simply completed. After opening the Snapchat app, navigate to the Recollections part, then select “Choose” on the high of the web page, and choose as much as 100 Recollections at a time that you just need to export. Then choose a vacation spot and faucet “Obtain.”
When you have greater than 100 Recollections, you’ll have to repeat this course of.
Methods to save your Snapchat knowledge
If you wish to squirrel away extra knowledge than your Recollections, Snapchat is required by legislation in numerous jurisdictions to permit its customers to obtain their private knowledge—which is true of different social media platforms as nicely.
For those who’ve by no means downloaded this sort of knowledge up to now, a slight caveat: Relying on what info you’re after and the way energetic a Snapchatter you’ve been, it’s possible you’ll be overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of knowledge at your disposal.
Whilst you might go for the kitchen-sink method and obtain every little thing you’ll be able to, these recordsdata might embrace trivialities you don’t care about (like your login and search histories), together with extra sentimental info you probably do care about (like your Recollections and saved chat historical past). The excellent news is, you may also choose the precise classes of knowledge you need to obtain.
Snapchat doesn’t present all your info in a single neat file—moderately, you’ll obtain a zipper file—so that you’ll need to make sure you could have adequate storage for the information.
Right here’s the step-by-step course of to obtain no matter Snapchat knowledge you fancy:
- Open the Snapchat app, go to your profile, and navigate to the “Settings” icon.
- Scroll to pick out “My Information.”
- Choose the precise knowledge you need to embrace in your knowledge obtain.
- Specify a particular knowledge vary of knowledge you’d prefer to obtain, or obtain all out there knowledge.
- Affirm the e-mail handle the place you’d prefer to be notified.
- Click on “Submit” to formally submit your knowledge request.
As soon as your knowledge is able to be downloaded, you’ll obtain an e mail from Snapchat with a hyperlink the place you’ll be able to entry your info.
As the corporate notes, “this course of can take time to finish,” which customers are reporting can vary from a number of hours to a number of weeks.
Griping about Snap’s plan
What Snapchat is doing, in essence, is transferring the price of storage over to customers.
Obtain all these Recollections onto your iPhone, for instance, and that may simply ratchet up the quantity of knowledge you could have saved in your iCloud. Practically two-thirds of Apple prospects paid for iCloud storage in 2024, making it Apple’s hottest paid service, in accordance with CIRP knowledge.
However in contrast to a few of its rivals, together with Instagram and TikTok, Snapchat is testing the waters of whether or not its customers are prepared to pay for storing social media posts.
As individuals have lamented on-line, this can be the way forward for all social media platforms, or simply one other instance of so-called subscription creep, by which we’re all paying for an increasing number of subscriptions for issues that when had been free.
However irrespective of their gripe, some individuals see these types of strikes by social media giants as an excuse to bail.
“Now give me the explanation why I ought to proceed utilizing Snapchat in 2025,” one particular person wrote on Reddit. “Oh wait, there aren’t any besides my mates.”
Added one other person on a distinct subreddit: “It will be a disgrace if we simply deleted social media.”
