Snapchat users share fury at upcoming fees for Memories storage

“Half my life was spent on this app and now they expect us to pay for it.”

One-star reviews and feelings of unfairness have dominated online discussions ever since popular messaging app Snapchat became the latest tech firm. put a price on a service that people used to enjoy using for free.

In September, the app's parent company Snap announced it would start charging people if they have more than five gigabytes of previously shared images and videos saved as memories.

For many, these retro posts serve as a window into the past, leading some to accuse the firm of “corporate greed” in social media posts and negative reviews in the Google and Apple app stores.

Snap compared its paid storage plans to Apple and Google's smartphone plans.

And as an alternative for those who don't want to pay, users you can download your memorieswhich for some contain tens of gigabytes of data on their device.

The company told the BBC that the changes would only affect a small number of users.

He also admitted that it was “never easy to go from getting a service for free to paying for it” but suggested it would be “worth the cost” for users.

Many criticizing the move online seem to disagree.

An online petition called the fee a “memory tax”, with commenters calling it “dystopian” and “ridiculous”, with one person threatening to never use the app again.

Meanwhile, in a one-star review on the Google Play store, a person identifying herself as Natasha Jonsson said it seemed “very unethical.”

“If I know millennials correctly, most of us have years of Snapchat memories,” they said.

“And most of us kept the app for that reason alone.

“5GB is absolutely nothing if you have years of memories… Bye Snap.”

And Guste Wen, a 20-year-old journalism student from London, took to TikTok to share her plans to delete the app.

“I decided I needed to download all my memories as soon as possible,” she told BBC News.

“Almost all of my teenage years are documented in Snapchat memories, all the photos there are very important to me.

“It just doesn’t make sense to charge people for something that’s been free for years.”

Snapchat has yet to say how much the storage plans will cost in the UK, only saying they are part of a “gradual global rollout”.

But Amber Daly, 23, who also lives in London, said in a TikTok post that she was “distraught” by the allegations.

Amber told the BBC that the app has become “part of everyday life” since she started using it in 2014.

While she said she understood the platform was there to make money, Amber suggested that the Memories feature meant more to users than the company could have imagined.

“I think it's quite unfair to charge customers who have been loyal and loyal,” she said.

“These are not just memories, these are our real memories.”

Companies choosing to charge users for a service that was previously free is nothing new, and millions of people pay for services like iCloud and Google Drive to back up their photos and videos from their smartphones.

The reality of storing data in the cloud, which some in the tech industry like to call simply “someone else's computer,” is that it costs money.

“Putting trillions of memories on Snapchat is not a trivial task,” social media consultant Matt Navarra told the BBC.

“Snapchat has to try to find a way to cover the costs of storage, bandwidth, backup, content delivery, encryption, all of that.”

But Mr Navarra said introducing a fee for a service that was previously free and users were encouraged to use as such could seem like a “bait and switch” to some.

“Moving the goalposts after people have created this huge digital archive is not really the right thing to do,” he said.

And for many, he added, “memories are not just data dumps, they are emotional artifacts.”

The sentiment was echoed by those who left critical reviews, with one person calling their Snapchat photos and videos “the most valuable to me.”

“[Memories] they include every aspect of my life, from celebrating the birth of new family members, mourning deceased loved ones, making memories with friends/family, [and] all my teenage years,” they wrote.

Dr Taylor Annabell, a research fellow at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, said Snapchat's move shows the consequences of using commercial platforms to store sentimental personal content.

“They capitalize on this trust, interdependence and the presumption of endless access, which even incentivizes some users to stay on the platform or continue using it to scroll through their archive,” she told the BBC.

“But these are not benevolent keepers of personal memory.”