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Practically everything involves a subscription these days, but should you really pay for Snapchat of all things? The messaging app whose founders ushered in a new era of social media by introducing ephemeral, picture-based messaging is betting that you’ll shell out a few bucks a month to supercharge your experience. Introduced in June 2022, Snapchat+ is aimed at the most dedicated users of the ghostly yellow app. If you’re an avid user who keeps the app front and center on your home screen, you might have wondered whether a subscription is worth it and just what you’ll get for your money.
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In addition to other features that make Snapchat+ worth it, subscribers can see a whole lot more information in the app. From the ability to view exactly when and how many times friends replay your Stories to fun features that let you visualize where you are in their orbits, Snapchat+ dedicates a lot of effort toward making you feel omniscient within the app. So, in order to help you decide whether it’s worth shelling out a few bucks a month to the yellow ghost, here’s what you need to know about the extra powers of sight granted to Snapchat+ subscribers.
Story view notifications, rewatch counts, and more
One of the major bonuses with Snapchat+ comes in the form of upgrades to your Stories. It allows users to post photos and videos either publicly or for friends to see. The posts disappear after 24 hours, and in that time you can see who viewed them. Or at least that’s how it works for normal users.
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Snapchat+ users get a significantly upgraded Stories experience with several features that give you a supercharged level of control. Firstly, you can put a custom timer on your Stories, extending their shelf life beyond the standard 24 hours up to three days, or as little as one hour. You can also set notifications for when specific friends look at your story — all the better to gauge whether your crush likes you back. You can even get Story rewatch counts that tell you how many of your friends have watched your Story multiple times. Notably, though, you can’t see which friends rewatched it, nor how many times they did so. Then there’s the Story Timestamps feature, which tells you the exact times friends viewed your Story.
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Story replies affect not what you see, but what others see by prioritizing your story reply above others. This appears to be aimed at those who want their favorite creators to pay attention to them. Even Snap’s own support documentation for this feature shows a user replying to a creator named Model Roz. Then there’s Story Boost, which puts your Story ahead of others in your friends’ Story carousels. If you want people to see your Story but posted it at an inopportune time of day or night, this can help ensure everyone sees that can’t-miss video of your pet.
Catch sneaky peekers, edit messages, and other chat features
Some of the most compelling features accessed via Snapchat+ revolve around giving you more information about how others interact with your chats and Snaps. You can control what you and others see to a greater degree than non-paying users. The best example of this is Peek a Peek, which informs you when someone has swiped partway into a conversation to see your message without generating a read receipt. You’ll catch them at their game, with Snapchat displaying an eyes emoji next to that conversation in your list of chats, or by showing their Bitmoji on the side of the screen when you’re in the chat itself. Oddly, Snap’s documentation notes that this only works when you’re looking at the chat or list of chats at the same time as the peeker.
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When it comes to sending pictures, Snapchat+ subscribers can send Ligtning Snaps with split second timers, giving the recipient only a small glimpse of the photo before it disappears. These can be as short as one-tenth of a second. You’ll also get the ability to rewatch Snaps you’ve sent, which could be useful if you’re not sure whether there was a typo in your caption or want to go back and save the photo.
Normally, Snapchat users can replay a Snap they receive just one time, but Snapchat+ subscribers get one extra replay. Amusingly, that means you’ll be able to get a better look at Lightning Snaps sent to you by other Snapchat+ subscribers. Just don’t leave the chat before using your extra replay or it will go away.
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Retrace your path with Footsteps
The Snap Map has been one of Snapchat’s core features for years now. It’s an interactive map that displays not only the hottest local spots for restaurants, bars, and other locations, but also a timeline of Stories posted at particular locations. Most importantly, it shows live locations for all of your friends (unless they opt out by turning on Ghost Mode). Snapchat+ subscribers can take things a (literal) step further by gaining pre-release access to a new Snap Map feature called Footsteps.
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Footsteps isn’t really a map-based location history tracker like the Timeline feature in Google Maps. Instead, it gamifies real-world exploration by telling you how much of a neighborhood you’ve explored, expressed in a percentage. For example, we saw 24.2% of a SlashGear writer’s home city had been explored when testing this feature. You’ll also see which areas of the map you’ve explored, with those areas shaded over with a purple tint on the Snap Map.
The Footsteps feature does not work when you’re in Ghost Mode, so privacy minded users won’t be getting much benefit from it. And you probably should stay ghosted, since Snapchat is neither private nor safe. A cynical read of Footsteps might be that it’s simply a way to encourage more users to let Snap collect their location, since a large number of users tend to keep themselves in Ghost Mode for good reason — the shady side of Snapchat is all too real, and the app has a predator problem. It’s also possible, though there’s no confirmation of this, that Footsteps might tie into Snap’s recent ambitions in the field of augmented reality. The company recently showed off its new augmented reality glasses, which project objects and information onto the world around you.
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Turn your friendships into solar systems, and other friendly features
For all its quirks, accumulating bloat, and endless nests of confusing menus that have become somewhat labyrinthian even to its most frequent users, Snapchat remains popular because of its focus on friendships. From features like BFFs that seem transported from the MySpace era of social media to the Snap Streak feature that keeps teens talking to their best friends, Snapchat understands that its users like to visualize their friendship dynamics.
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Enter Solar System, a Snapchat+ feature that lets you see where you land in your friends’ social orbits in a very literal way. This feature was actually dialed back after reports that it contributed to teens’ mental health issues, so now it must be turned on manually by Snapchat+ subscribers. From the friendship page of a friend’s profile, you can tap on the Friends or Best Friends tag, but only when you see a golden band around it, to see where you sit on their Solar System. Your friend will be represented as the sun, with their closest friends represented by planets in our solar system. Closest to the sun — Mercury — is the person your friend interacts with most, while the furthest — Neptune — is the eighth most interacted with friend. Based on which planet you’re depicted as, you can see which friends your friend is Snapping with more or less than you.
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Snapchat+ subscribers can additionally pin a friend as their “#1 BFF,” which means you’ll always see them at the top of your messaging list. And you can extend your Best Friends list to include up to 16 people, so you’ll see them all grouped in your Best Friends list.
