Snapchat has launched a new feature called Snapchat Plans, and for a brief moment, I thought Snap had decided to add another pricing tier to the app.
Thankfully, it hasn’t.
Instead, Snapchat Plans is about the other kind of plans: the ones where you and your friends say “we should totally hang out” in a group chat and then somehow never actually do it.
Announced September 10, Snapchat Plans is a new set of features designed to help users organize real-world meetups directly through Snapchat. It lets friends create events, send invitations, track who’s coming, and keep all the important details in one place.
So yes, Snapchat wants to help you make plans. It just isn’t charging you for them.
Snapchat Plans is for actual plans
Snapchat says IRL meetups often start with a conversation that eventually turns into an idea, and then—if everyone remembers—the idea becomes an actual plan.
The problem is that those details can quickly disappear into the chaos of a group chat. Someone suggests Saturday. Someone else says Sunday works better. Somebody asks what time. Then everyone gets distracted, and three days later nobody remembers what was agreed upon.
Snapchat Plans is essentially designed to prevent that particular form of social failure.
Users can create a Plan by adding a title, date and time, then invite up to 200 friends. Snapchat also adds dynamic Bitmoji-powered cover art that changes as people respond to the event.

Invitations are delivered directly through one-on-one chats, where friends can respond with “Going,” “Maybe,” or “Can’t Go.”
And honestly, “Maybe” is probably going to be doing some heavy lifting here.
Snap says 35% of recently surveyed U.S. Snapchat users between the ages of 13 and 24 already use group chats to make plans and organize events. Plans essentially takes that behavior and gives it a dedicated place inside Snapchat.
There’s a new “My Plans” section
Once you’ve created or been invited to a Plan, Snapchat doesn’t expect you to scroll through months of conversations trying to find the original message.
A new “My Plans” section on your profile brings together your current, upcoming and past Plans. Snapchat is also adding an “Our Plans” section to Friendship Profiles, showing events that you and a particular friend have in common.
Hosts can see who’s attending, invite additional people and change event details. Guests can view the full guest list and update their RSVP if their carefully constructed weekend schedule inevitably falls apart.
Snapchat will also send attendees a reminder one hour before the event starts.
Which is probably less about sophisticated event management and more about preventing someone from saying, “Wait, that was today?”
Snapchat wants you to leave Snapchat
There’s an amusing contradiction here: Snapchat is building a feature inside its social app specifically to get people away from their phones and together in the real world.
But that is very much the point.
Snapchat says Plans is intended for everything from birthday celebrations and sporting events to study sessions and weekend hangouts. The feature is private and invite-only, keeping event details between the people who were actually invited.
Snap also says users will soon be able to create events directly within a chat, making the whole process even more integrated into the conversations where these plans usually begin.
It’s also worth noting that Plans isn’t completely coming out of nowhere. Snapchat has been building more tools around real-world interaction, including its Snap Map features, while competitors such as Apple’s Invites and dedicated event-planning services like Partiful have also made digital invitations and meetups a bigger part of the social-app landscape.
For Snapchat, though, the pitch is pretty straightforward: you’re already talking to your friends here, so why not actually organize the meetup here too?
And unlike what I initially assumed from the name, there is no “Snapchat Plans Premium” hiding behind a paywall.
At least for now.
Because if Snapchat ever announces “Plans+,” I am officially reading the pricing page before anything else.
Snapchat Plans is rolling out as a new way to organize real-world events, with invitations, RSVPs, reminders and dedicated event pages built into the app. In other words, Snapchat has finally found a way to make “we should hang out sometime” slightly more likely to become “see you Saturday.”
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