Snapchat now offers paid animated selfie lenses for 99 cents

Back in September, messaging app Snapchat acquired selfie animation app Looksery, and started offering free selfie lenses. These are cartoon-like images of eyeballs, rainbow vomit or other exaggerated filters that can be added to spruce up your selfies. Seven free lenses are offered by Snapchat, with one of the seven getting replaced each day by a new one.

Now, in addition to the seven free animated selfie lenses, Snapchat is offering 30 additional ones priced at 99 cents apiece. Unlike the free lenses, the paid ones are kept by the buyer forever. Snapchat did not mention how often the 30 paid lenses will be updated. Looking to monetize the app to prove that it is worth the high valuation of greater than $10 billion placed on on it during funding rounds last year, Snapchat started charging users 99 cents to replay a read message three additional times after one free replay. Snapchat messages disappear ten seconds after being viewed by the recipient.

Snapchat is also trying to bring in revenue by getting companies to sponsor selfie lenses and ads. But it might not be enough. Fidelity has already slashed the value of its holdings in Snapchat by 25%.

If you are a Snapchat subscriber, you can access the selfie lenses by using the front-facing camera on your phone. Long press on the image of your face on the screen to see the selection of the animated selfie filters; select the one you want to use, preview it, and snap the selfie. It should be interesting to see if users decide to stick with the freebies, or if the young kids that are the apps main demographic feel like shelling out for the paid selfie lenses.

source: TechCrunch