Before You Pay For Snapchat Storage, Try These 3 Other Free & Affordable Options

With over 900 million monthly active users worldwide, Snapchat is among the most popular social media platforms out there. While other apps like Instagram focus mainly on public posts, Snapchat has maintained its niche of being more of an instant messaging platform where you can send your friends snaps or texts individually. Snapchat also benefits from a huge library of filters, or lenses, as the company likes to call them. This has unsurprisingly made Snapchat the default for many when it comes to taking selfies on their smartphones. 

Before you send snaps to your friends, you can save them to Snapchat's dedicated storage service, Memories. You can access the Memories section by swiping up, and there you'll find where all of your saved photos and videos live. You will also find an assortment of memories bundled together, so you can glance back into the past. For as long as Memories has been a feature on Snapchat, it has been completely free to save snaps with no storage limits. You could then switch devices and have your Snapchat Memories made readily available in a few moments. 

That, however, has changed. The company recently introduced a 5GB limit to its Memories feature, and users won't be able to save snaps if they exceed this limit. Snapchat did introduce paid storage tiers, but for the many users who aren't too keen on paying yet another monthly subscription fee, here are a few ways you can continue to save your Snapchat memories.

5GB is not a lot of storage space, especially if your snaps consist of a lot of videos. Fortunately, Snapchat offers you the option to save your snaps locally to your phone's storage in addition to saving them to Memories when you tap the "Save" button. With internal storage spaces on smartphones increasing, you might have a few gigabytes to spare for your Snapchat photos and videos. 

This option might not be enabled by default. To make sure that snaps you save are also saved to your phone's gallery, open Snapchat, navigate to Settings > Memories > Save Button, and make sure the "Memories & Camera Roll" option is selected. If you've already hit the 5GB limit, you can change this option to just "Camera Roll." Any future snaps you save will now be directed to your phone's local storage.

As for all of your previously saved Memories, you can navigate to Snapchat Settings > My Data, and request an export of your saved data. Make sure to select the date range as "All time" — you should receive your memories via email, but this may take a few hours or even a few days, depending on how many snaps you have saved in your Memories.

You can then transfer all of these photos and videos to your phone's local storage. Creating an album will help organize your media, and you can do this on both Android and iOS smartphones.

What makes Snapchat's Memories feature so convenient is the fact that you can switch devices and have your entire library of photos and videos accessible with a simple swipe. This is because it's stored on the cloud — and while switching to your phone's local storage is a free alternative, you lose this convenience altogether. A viable alternative to Snapchat's restrictive storage space is to make the switch to one of the many other cloud storage options you have available.

For instance, Google Photos offers three times the storage space at 15GB, and all you need is a free Google account — which you likely already have. Apple's iCloud matches Snapchat's free 5GB storage tier, but if you're already subscribed to an iCloud+ plan, you can use this cloud storage space to store your Snapchat Memories in addition to the photos and videos you take using your iPhone.

If you decide to go the third-party cloud storage route, you'll be pleased to know that you will still benefit from a similar, if not greater, set of utilities as Snapchat's Memories feature. Both the Apple Photos and Google Photos apps offer automatic device backup and cloud sync, editing tools, and, more recently, powerful natural language search — which can help you find the exact snap you have in mind using just a few keywords. Like Memories, your media library, when using a cloud storage solution, will be carried over to other devices you sign into.

Relying on local storage or other cloud storage services may be the cheaper choice, but neither is as convenient or snappy as just using Snapchat's built-in Memories feature — after all, it just takes a swipe for you to access your saved snaps. Snapchat has priced its 100GB storage tier at $1.99 per month, which isn't terribly bad when compared to other cloud storage services. Still, you need to keep in mind that this is app-exclusive and can only be used to store photos and videos you primarily take using Snapchat.

If you are already open to the idea of giving in and paying for a Snapchat subscription, perhaps glancing over to the Snapchat+ plan could prove to be worthwhile. We've covered some of the best Snapchat+ features previously, and the experience for premium users on the app always seems fresh thanks to the addition of new and unique features every so often. Notable features on Snapchat+ include custom app themes, the ability to pin a best friend, changing chat backgrounds, and selecting a different app icon.

There's a handful of AI-driven features, like extending snaps for a wider perspective or generating AI captions. For avid Snapchat users, all of these goodies may add to the experience for $3.99 a month. In addition to all of these features, you also get 250GB of Memories storage, which works out to be a better value proposition than going with the base storage-only plan.