Snapchat Fury users are participating in an upcoming fee to store memories

“Half my life is on this app and now they expect us to pay for it.”

One-star reviews and feelings of injustice have dominated online discussion since popular messaging app Snapchat became the latest tech company To put a price on a service that people previously enjoyed using for free.

Announced by its parent company in September, it will start charging people if they have more than five gigabytes of shared photos and videos that were previously saved as memories.

For many, these reactionary posts serve as a window into the past — leading some to accuse the company of “corporate greed” in posts on social media and negative reviews on the Google and Apple app stores.

Snap compared its paid storage plans with those offered by Apple and Google for smartphones.

As an alternative for those who do not want to pay, users Their memories can be downloadedwhich for some tens of gigabytes of data, to their devices.

The company only told the BBC that a small number of users would be affected by the changes.

He also acknowledged that “it’s never been easy to go from receiving a service for free to paying for it” – but suggested it would be “worth the cost” for users.

Many critics of the move online seem to disagree.

An online petition calls the fee a “memory tax,” with commenters calling it “dystopian” and “ridiculous” — while one person threatened to never use the app again.

Meanwhile, in a one-star review on the Google Play Store, someone calling herself Natacha Jonsson said it felt “very unethical.”

“If I define millennials correctly, most of us have years’ worth of memories on Snapchat,” they said.

“And most of us kept the app just for that reason.

“5GB is not at all when you have years of memories…goodbye.”

Ghost Finn, a 20-year-old journalism student in London, shared her plans to delete the app.

“I decided I needed to download all my memories as quickly as possible,” she told BBC News.

“Almost all of my teenage years have been documented through my Snapchat memories, and all the photos in there are really important to me.

“It doesn’t make sense to start charging people for something that has been free for many years.”

Snapchat has not yet said how much the storage plans will cost in the UK – only that it is part of a “gradual global rollout”.

But Amber Daly, 23, who also lives in London, said in a post on TikTok that she would be “distraught” by the charges.

Amber told the BBC that the app has become “part of everyday life” since she started using it in 2014.

Although she said she understood that the platform needed to make money, Amber suggested that the Memories feature meant more to users than the company might realize.

“I think it’s an unfair move to charge your customers who have been loyal and dedicated,” she said.

“These are not just called memories, these are our actual memories.”

Companies deciding to charge users for a service that was previously free is nothing new, and millions are paying services like ICLOUD and Google Drive to copy their photos and videos from their smartphones.

The reality of storing data in the cloud — which some in the tech industry like to refer to simply “someone else’s computer” — does cost money.

“Hosting trillions of memories on Snapchat is not a trivial sum,” Matt Navarra, a social media consultant, told the BBC.

“Snapchat has to try to find a way to cover the cost of storage, bandwidth, backup, content delivery, encryption — all of that stuff.”

But Mr Navarra said offering a fee for a service that was previously free, and users were encouraged to use it as such, may feel like a “bait and switch” to some.

“Moving the goals around after people have built this huge digital archive just doesn’t sit right,” he said.

For many, he added, “Memories are not just data dumps, they are emotional artifacts.”

The sentiment was shared by those leaving critical reviews, with one person calling Snapchat photos and videos “the most precious thing to me.”

“[Memories] I have every aspect of my life inside them from celebrations of new family members’ births, mourning of loved ones, reminiscing with friends/family, [and] They wrote.

Dr. Taylor Annabel, a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, said Snapchat’s move shows the implications for commercial platforms used to store emotional, personal content.

“They benefit from this trust, connectedness and assumption of never-ending access, which even motivates some users to stick with the platform or keep using it in order to once again scroll through their archives,” she told the BBC.

“But these are not the benevolent guardians of personal memory.”