Author's manual survey of ~13,000 friend-of-friend Snapchat+ subscription datapoints argues Snap's paid-memory-storage conversion will beat investor expectations, a bullish case for Snap Inc.
SNAP — LONG The author contends investors expect Snap's plan to charge for photo storage to flop, but his manually collected sample of 5.5k friends-of-friends plus Omegle strangers (13k+ total) shows Snapchat+ penetration of 3.56% of DAUs / 1.88% of MAUs, which he implies is more than the market assumes. He notes Snap's Q3 2025 10-Q 'Other Revenue' of $189M (mostly Snapchat+) was 9% of total revenue and that subscription revenue is often valued at twice ad revenue, so higher conversion would be disproportionately valuable. The concrete catalyst he identifies is the September 2026 deadline when excess memories get deleted, which he expects could push subscription rates even higher over the coming year. Stated risk: the polling sample includes inactive accounts and is only a fraction of the total user base, so it may not represent the whole population.
TLDR: in September Snapchat announced that users with more than 5GB of memories would have to start paying on a monthly basis or their excess photos/videos would be deleted in September 2026. Users were outraged; investors seem to think it will flop. But I manually collected data that suggests otherwise