Snapchat officially launched its paid subscription plan called Snapchat+ today that will offer exclusive features like the ability to change the app icon and being able to see which people have rewatched your Stories.

Earlier this month, the firm confirmed that it’s testing this feature, without giving out many details. Now, it has made Snapchat+ official. The new subscription plan will launch in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, with more countries to be added soon.

“Today we’re launching Snapchat+, a collection of exclusive, experimental, and pre-release features available in Snapchat for $3.99/month.  This subscription will allow us to deliver new Snapchat features to some of the most passionate members of our community and allow us to provide prioritized support,” the company said.

Apart from custom app icons and story rewatch count, Snapchat+ will unlock a special badge, the ability to pin a friend as your #1 friend, and the ability to see “the general direction of travel for where friends have moved recently.” The company said that the last feature is only available if your friends have already consented to share their location. So at the moment, most of these features are related to profile and app appearance.

It’s not yet clear how Snapchat plans to differentiate between features released for beta testers as compared to the ones released for subscribers. We’ll update as we learn more about the service from Snap.

Many social media platforms are experimenting with subscription-based services to earn more revenue. Last year, Twitter debuted its Twitter Blue service in Canada and Australia, later expanding it to the U.S. and New Zealand. Earlier this month, messaging app Telegram also launched a paid premium tier with features like more chat folders and the ability to send larger files (up to 4GB size) on the app.

While Snapchat had stellar growth numbers in Q1 2022, the company expressed concerns about hitting its revenue targets because of the war in Ukraine. In May, the company said that it will miss its revenue goals for Q2 2022.

However, the company’s SVP of Product, Jacob Andreou, told The Verge in an interview that “ads are going to be at the core of our business model for the long term” and the firm doesn’t expect the new subscription service to be a “material new revenue source.”

Source: techcrunch.com