Evan Spiegel: Snapchat Plus hits $1B ARR and 25M subscribers, Specs spun out as standalone company

Summary

Snapchat Plus has reached $1 billion in annual run rate with 25 million subscribers. Evan Spiegel calls this an ESPN-scale achievement and a narrative violation for social media. The subscription tier costs $22 per month and grew from user demand for power-user features like chat backgrounds and Bitmoji pets that the company could not justify building into a billion-person product. Feature requests come directly through evansnap.com, which routes to Spiegel's phone.

Revenue diversification

Spiegel frames the subscription success as part of a broader effort to diversify revenue away from a concentrated advertiser base. Three or four years ago, the business was almost entirely large customers concentrated in the US. Snap has since rebuilt its ad platform to serve small and medium customers optimizing for lower-funnel goals, reducing what he calls "unhelpful volatility."

Snapchat emphasizes the 13-34 demographic, viewing formative years as critical for brand loyalty, and focuses on a metric advertisers value: new customer acquisition. Lower funnel performance on Snapchat consistently moves the needle for long-term customer value. Spiegel argues this is more defensible than platforms where advertisers feel they are paying for traffic they already owned.

Generative AI at scale

In Q4, 700 million people used generative AI lenses on Snapchat. Lens Plus paywalls the most advanced AI image and video editing features. When asked about responsible rollout of generative video, Spiegel details safeguards: preventing nude generation, removing people from compromising positions, blocking copyrighted content reproduction, and conducting adversarial testing. The company layers these protections into open prompt experiences and applies them to both internal studio work and partner-developed experiences.

The developer ecosystem spans 400,000+ creators building lenses. Developers can apply to include lenses in Lens Plus and earn revenue share based on engagement. Snap maintains an internal studio and partnerships with production companies for branded lens experiences.

Easy Lens, which allows prompt-based lens creation, has driven a significant step change in lens creation volume. Spiegel expects Lens Studio, the professional tool, to shift toward agentic engineering, where prompts wire up domain-specific functionality rather than manual code.

User-generated content versus AI content

Generative AI performs strongly for communication and personalization use cases that Spiegel calls "inside jokes" shared among tight friend groups. It performs poorly on content consumption. Authentic, original, unedited, non-AI content dominates distribution on Spotlight and Boost, mapping to Snapchat's fundamental identity: content captured in the camera, not uploaded or heavily produced.

Snapchat experimented with premium shows years ago and pulled back. Spiegel credits the massive volume of organic creativity in the Snapchat camera with building a "vibrant organic creator ecosystem," and sees that as more valuable than polished publisher content. Users want creators who feel like neighbors, not productions.

Specs becomes a standalone company

Snap spun out Specs, its smart glasses hardware, into a standalone subsidiary, marking the transition from "R&D science project to real company." Spiegel frames this timing as crucial: at the start of 2026, it became clear that software is no longer a moat. App stores are no longer moats. Building software has become easy enough that even prompt-based development works.

This opens the window for new computing platforms. Specs positions itself as a supervisor interface for agents—a heads-up display for monitoring background work rather than hunched-over laptop use. Spiegel sees hardware becoming more defensible precisely when software commoditizes, making Snap's decade-long investment in AR glasses suddenly more strategically valuable.

Engineering transition

Snap operates at two speeds internally. Some teams have fully embraced agentic engineering and no longer write code. Others operate traditionally. Spiegel emphasizes training and tooling adoption across the company to accelerate the transition. For enterprise, the upside excites him more than consumer applications: small and medium-sized businesses unlocking efficiency with agents at scale is "off the charts."

Engineers are still directing work under this model, but the medium has shifted from raw code to agent specification and oversight.

Creator subscriptions and live streaming

Snap is testing creator subscriptions with a small group, allowing existing subscribers to access new creator content and message directly. The infrastructure will seed the path to live streaming. Snapchat users have "very, very loyal relationships" with creators and return daily to their stories, making recurring relationships the natural wedge.

Time allocation

Spiegel currently allocates roughly 80-20 between Snapchat and Specs, expecting the split to shift closer to 50-50 as hardware ramps. His "happy place" is design reviews and making new products with the team, though the past few years have required heavy focus on rebuilding the advertising platform and scaling the SMB customer segment.