By Jerry Zhang

Snapchat’s decision to cap free “memories” storage at 5 gigabytes (GB), with older content for deletion unless users pay for additional space, is drawing frustrations from Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU)  students and raising questions about whether social media is entering its own era of subscription fatigue. 

The company announced the change on Sept. 26 through a media release, giving users more than five GB of saved photos and videos and a 12-month grace period to download or upgrade to a paid plan. Storage tiers now range from 100 GB to several terabytes through Snapchat’s new “Memories storage plans.” 

For everyday users, especially those who have relied on Snapchat for years to store personal memories and exchanges, the news did not land well. 

“I’m not a fan,” said Manan Jain, a third-year business management student at TMU. “I feel like slowly they are becoming a bit capitalistic and moving away from the originality, which was saving memories…making it unappealing for me to use on a daily basis.”

Jain expressed that his account contains nearly a decade’s worth of saved snaps, many not stored elsewhere, leaving him with little choice but to pay.  “I think I might have to get it, forcefully. I have no other option,” he said. 

Not all students plan to stay. Haley Varone-Evans, a third-year photography student and manager of Analogue Club, said she deleted Snapchat long before the new change. 

“I always thought it was kind of childish,” she said. “It’s just people sending meaningless images back and forth…like photos of a wall…and calling it a conversation.”

Varone-Evans expressed that the new limit could feel like losing part of people’s personal history. “Their whole life is in this little app…and those photographs are very treasured memories,” she said. 

Varone-Evans said the collection of memories on Snapchat functions like a personal archive, making the prospect of losing it feel “traumatic and stressful.”

Snapchat first introduced its memories feature in July 2016, allowing users to save photos and videos within the app instead of on their devices. Since then, the company says users have saved more than one trillion memories globally, averaging roughly 240 saved per person. According to Snapchat, most users remain under the new five GB limit, which means only frequent users with years of archived content will be affected. 

As a film photographer, Varone-Evans said the change made her think about how little ownership users have online over their own data. 

“With analogue, you own all of your stuff…you can sell print if you’d like,” she said. “No one really has that information. It’s very private. It’s very personal…when they can see everything, privacy is now completely out the window.”

Both students said the change reveals how fragile digital ownership really is.  Jain said it “makes me realize” that companies rarely give clear warnings before major updates. Varone-Evans shared the distrust, saying she doesn’t believe the platform truly deletes users’ content. 

“We all know that those images are there forever,” she said.

Varone-Evans adds that the subscription model across apps such as Amazon has become “overwhelming.” “I pay for [it] out of my own pocket and then I go to watch a movie and they’re like, ‘I’m sorry, you need another subscription’…I have to get five different subscriptions within one subscription.” 

She notes, “It adds up…and you just start to not really care about how much you’re spending.”

According to Michael Mulvey, associate professor of marketing at the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management, the shift reflects a broader monetization strategy across tech platforms. 

“It’s a company and so it has shareholders, and their job is to make money,” he said. “They’re probably just looking at some money of what they gave away once upon a time, basically because it was like a lost leader.”

Mulvey said the cost of storing a massive amount of user-generated content is a factor for the companies rethink their costs. 

“Memory and cloud storage have a real cost, especially since so much of what is being produced is video-based content,” he said. “It actually needs an enormous amount of storage space.”

He added that users often forget they don’t truly own their digital archives. “We became used to basically somebody holding them for us for free, but now they’re basically saying ‘it’s not free,’” Mulvey said. “We’re leasing companies. If you want to have space, you gotta pay the toll.”

Mulvey explains that this shift also speaks to a generational change in how people relate to digital media. “When I was 13 or 14 and got my first camera, it was really expensive… those photos were owned. They became yours, you owned the negatives,” he said. “With digital, that all changed.”

He emphasized, “Yesterday cost for the price of making memories. Today’s price of keeping them.” 

These changes follow a series of pivots to paid features, such as Meta’s “Verified” program, X’s Premium tier and TikTok’s expanded shop features. Mulvey expresses the trend showing that social media companies can no longer rely solely on advertising revenue. 

He notes that users are feeling that subscription fatigue is setting in with constant subscriptions. “It’s like the first domino has fallen and people are starting to get more sensitive,” he said. “These fees add up a lot, actually… people really start to think about, ‘am I getting value out of this?’ and perhaps make some trade-offs, some tough decisions.”

Mehak Bhaerti, assistant professor of marketing management at TMU’s Ted Rogers School of Management, echoed that same sentiment in an emailed statement.“Online space is starting to feel a lot like real estate—limited, valuable, and something you eventually have to pay to keep,” she said.

For students like Jain, the fatigue is already setting in. He said it “definitely adds up,” comparing digital costs like Snapchat, Canva and monthly utilities. 

Both experts warned that while subscription models can be lucrative, they risk alienating users who already feel trapped by paywalls.

For heavy Snapchat users like Jain, this change marks a turning point. While for Varone-Evans, the new policy is another sign of social media losing its purpose. 

“We’re missing the core values of what social media is… sharing community and staying in touch with one another,” Varone-Evans said. “It’s kind of upsetting.”