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Social media platform Snapchat on Wednesday (August 10) rolled out its paid subscription service Snapchat+ in India for INR 49 per month.

The service aims to monetise Snapchats’s huge market base of more than 100 Mn users in the country. It also comes at a time when Snap Inc is looking to diversify its revenue stream and add more paying customers to its 332 Mn global user base.

The subscription service claims to offer a slew of exclusive services including the option to pin an individual as best friend on the profile, change app icon and a rewatch indicator. In addition, the paid service will also include the newly-launched Snapchat for Web that allows a user to chat with other users via a video call.

“India is an important market for Snap and investments in localising the app experience has been key to our growth in the region. We’re very excited about offering exclusive, experimental, and pre-release features to our Indian Snapchatter community who is eager to try our new products and features,” Snap Inc’s interim-market development lead Lakshya Malu was quoted as saying by reports.

The launch comes more than a month after Snap Inc launched Snapchat+ for users in the US, the UK and Canada for $3.99 in June this year. In rupee terms, the service is priced upwards of INR 315 in North America, while it is priced at just INR 49 in India. The brand-new subscription reportedly helped Snap Inc realise a revenue of $5 Mn in its very first month.

The lower price could likely be attributed to India being the largest market in terms of users for Snap and also price conscious. 

The efforts to monetise its offerings come at a time when the social media platform reported a dismal performance in the second quarter (Q2) of the calendar year 2022 (CY22). Snap Inc reported a loss of $10 Bn in the period and the company refused to predict its future financial performance due to ‘uncertainties related to the operating environment’.

Right after the results were announced, media reports said that the company was also looking to lay off employees. 

Snapchat follows the footsteps of popular messaging app Telegram that has also announced that it will unveil subscription services. Telegram’s top boss Pavel Durov was recently quoted as saying that a new subscription-based service would be launched later in August this year. 

This comes in the aftermath of Apple introducing a new privacy feature on iOS 14.5 which allows users to turn off ad tracking. The functionality has hit the ad revenues of many of these apps which depend on tracking data to better target ads for customers.

The photo-sharing app has been working to ramp up its presence in India and localise experiences for its Indian users. In October 2021, the company organised a ‘Snap In India’ event that brought together Snapchat’s community of creators and users.

It has also announced a slew of partnerships with local companies such as Flipkart to develop augmented reality (AR) experiences for the ecommerce company, among other offerings. 

Snapchat operates in a space largely dominated by tech giants such as Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, as well as homegrown startups including ShareChat, Chingari and Moj.