Your Custom Snapchat Lens or Filter Could Cost You $1,000

Snapchat just rolled out a feature that lets you create custom Filters and Lenses. While the average Geofilter won't run you more than a few bucks, it's not that hard to exponentially jack up the price. Amazingly enough, Snapchat's latest attempt to monetize their platform can ultimately cost you as much as $999.99. Ignore the penny, let's call that a cool grand.

The cost of the Geofilter is determined by two factors: How long you want it to run for, and how large you want its area to encompass. The maximum amount of time you can have a Geofilter stick around is about five months (they only let you select a date until August).

By default, a five-month-stay will cost $400. You won't need to increase the size of your Geofilter area much from here to see it jump up in increments of $100 each. Getting to the hard cap of $1,000 gave me an area about as big as my block. Any larger, and Snapchat told me to make the Geofence smaller or select a shorter duration.

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So let's see how big of an area we can choose if we keep the duration to a minimum. Now, the filter will run for a single beautiful day. Oddly enough, I couldn't reach the $1,000 cap before Snapchat told me to decrease the size of the Geofence — Snapchat only let me run up the tab to $700 for a single day.

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In all, this wonderful experiment taught us that the main bottleneck here is the size of the Geofilter itself, rather than the length of time you want it there for. A duration of five months for $1,000 certainly isn't a phenomenal deal, but if you have that kind of money to spend ... I'm sure there are many better uses.

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Cover image and screenshots by Brian Lang/Gadget Hacks