• by Colin Kirkland , September 22, 2023

As other leading social platforms are struggling to build their paid subscription models, Snapchat+ has taken off in popularity over the summer.

Since June 2023, Snapchat’s subscription offering has added one million users, bringing its total count to five million paying members.

Snapchat+ costs $3.99 per month and originally launched in June 2022. Two months in, the service had amassed one million subscribers. By February, the company counted two million, then three million in April, and one year out, four million users were paying for “exclusive, experimental, and pre-release features.”

Paying subscribers still only make up a fraction of the platform’s 750 million total monthly users, but this rapid growth bodes well for the company as it attempts to boost non-advertising sources of revenue. Snapchat+ is generating close to $20 million per month in direct revenue for the app.

The company is actually halfway toward its “medium-term goal” of reaching 10 million paying subscribers, according to what Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has said in the past.

“Since launch, subscribers have been the first to try more than 20 new features including our latest AI powered products, like My AI and Dreams, before they roll out widely to the rest of our community,” the company wrote in a statement. “In the past few weeks, we’ve also introduced extra Streak restores and expressive text sizes to emphasize what really matters.”

Compared to other social networks, Snap’s subscription offering is excelling.

After months of prodding users and forcing advertisers into its paid verification program, Elon Musk’s premium offering for X has just one million paying members in total, while Meta still hasn’t reported any subscriber numbers for its Meta Verified model for Instagram and Facebook.