How it works

Web Monetization is a browser technology that enables your audience to support your work — and the work of other photographers, writers, and creators — with a single monthly subscription. This subscription automatically sends out small payments (called “micropayments”) to creators around the web who share their work on platforms that support Web Monetization, like Write.as. Learn more about this, and what it means for our platform, in our announcement post on the Write.as blog.

Getting started

To accept micropayments on your Snap.as profile and galleries (such as snap.as/matt), you’ll simply add your payment pointer to your corresponding Write.as blog.

First, head to Write.as, navigate to your blog’s Customize page, and insert the payment pointer in the Web Monetization section. Of course, if you’ve already enabled Web Monetization on Write.as, your Snap.as profile is already Web Monetized, too!

What’s next

As we mentioned when launching this feature on Write.as, this is just the start for us. In time, we hope to build a unified way for photographers and writers to make a living from their work on our platform. We can’t wait to share what’s in store for us next!

Last year, we moved Snap.as out of “alpha” status and on to more permanent infrastructure. Once we migrated everyone over, we started to work on a stable, open publishing API. From Write.as, we know that this is critical for flexible tools like ours, so this was the first area we focused on. And we’re already seeing tools built on top of Snap.as — including our own!

Migrating and Publishing

If you’re technically-minded, you might already be thinking up some use cases for our new API. For us, we first saw its potential in migrating from other platforms to Write.as. So when we recently built our Hugo import tool for Write.as and WriteFreely, we included Snap.as support out of the box, so your photos could follow you from your Hugo blog to Write.as. Along with this, we released an official Go library for the Snap.as API.

We were also excited to see the community jump on board after we released our API documentation. For one, we saw the developer behind ThiefMD add the ability to upload photos to Snap.as, both in ThiefMD and the Vala library behind it!

Set phasers to upgrade because a new release of #ThiefMD is out.
- If you publish on https://t.co/j30DSPKFsB https://t.co/gg9Y8HvpLo is supported for pro users
- WordPress Featured Image is now supported
- Speed improvements in Experimental Mode
- And more...

— thiefmd (@thiefmd1) March 14, 2021

Up Next

Next, we plan to support more functionality through the API, from creating photo galleries to fetching account data.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback! Feel free to share your thoughts and ideas on the forum.

Since then, we've started building other parts of our suite, with Submit.as for submission management and Draft.as for version control. In this process, we've slowly worked out the best protocols and designs for making our suite of creative tools a reality. Now we're finally turning our focus back to Snap.as, bringing it up-to-date with our lessons learned and out of its “alpha” status. Here's what you can keep an eye out for in the coming months.

First, we've actually already launched Snap.as v2! It's running on modern infrastructure and includes upgrades like a Content Delivery Network (CDN). It's been restructured and integrated with our Write.as deployment process, so it's ready for rapid improvements this quarter.

With v2 launched, we've already started putting brand new users on it — if you started using Snap.as on or after October 6, you'll already be on the new system! But for our many existing Snap.as users, we'll soon migrate you over. Everything will remain the same for you — the Snap.as URLs you're using in blog posts, the add-on functionality you might've purchased, and of course your photos. But there will be some minor downtime on the uploading / photo management side while we migrate everyone's photos and data (your photos will remain online throughout the process).

We'll keep you updated both on Twitter and the fediverse about this — keep an eye out for that in the next week or two.

In the meantime, check out our roadmap for Snap.as and let us know what you'd like to see most! We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback over on the forum.

Enter our browser extension.

Available for Chrome and Firefox today, our new browser extension pops up a tiny window to drag a photo to, no matter where on the web you are. The photo is uploaded and the Markdown gets copied to your clipboard, so you can paste it anywhere you want it to show up. Boom. Quick and easy.

This is especially useful for Write.as users — in fact, it's primarily why we built it. Snap.as is meant to both stand on its own and work closely with the other products in our suite — and this brings your photos and writing together. A browser extension helps keep the Write.as editor clean while still letting you upload photos in the midst of your writing flow. It's an integration we're pretty happy with, and will continue tightening up over time.

We hope you enjoy, and we'd love to hear your feedback on the forums!

Under each photo, you can also add a caption formatted with Markdown. Add some text here to provide a little more context with your photo or tell a story.

To get started, navigate to your upload page and click Create photo album... near the bottom of the screen. There you can purchase this new feature for just $10 once to unlock it forever. If you aren't happy with it within the first 14 days, we'll be happy to refund your purchase.

This is a brand new feature we couldn't wait to show everyone, and there's much more to come, including more control over who can see your albums, how photos are sorted, and how albums look. Stay tuned for more updates on our Mastodon and Twitter feeds!

#updates #newfeatures #albums

Everything we've learned from selling Write.as subscriptions has played a major role in how we're pricing Snap.as. Besides the times that we've offered discounts on our Pro plan because someone didn't need every feature, we've heard many people say they wanted a more à la carte pricing model — and we agree! Pricing that allows people to spend exactly as much as they're comfortable with feels better and more honest, so that's what we'd like to implement with Snap.as.

Today, anyone paying $4 per month for a Write.as Pro subscription can upload their photos to Snap.as. In April, they'll be able to create simple photo albums like this one that they can share anywhere — and getting that feature will be a simple one-time charge, just like an in-app purchase you'd see in a mobile app.

We see these one-time charges for new functionality as a way to make sure people get the features they want without overpaying, but also in a way that works for the both of us. In the future, optional features like design customization and custom domains could be small add-ons that you buy once and enjoy indefinitely.

Besides that, we'll only charge for storage — i.e. how much server space you're using to store all of your photos. Write.as Pro users will see a larger amount of storage included with their subscription before they're ever charged, and Snap.as-only users will simply pay based on how much they use.

You'll see more specifics around our pricing in the coming weeks, but we wanted to give everyone a heads-up ahead of time. We can't wait to show you what we have in store!

We're still in the very early days of this product, so we're calling our initial release an alpha version — very bare-bones, not completely polished, but still useful right out of the gate. When we launch, you'll be able to quickly upload photos, save a note for each (more on this below), and get their URLs to include them in your Write.as posts.

We were planning to include the ability to import any existing images on your Write.as blogs, so they could have a permanent home within the Write.as suite of products. This is still coming, but not with the launch. We decided it's better to make sure this core product is solid, then add that feature next.

We are including the option to save text along with your photos. You'll see all it can do as we evolve, but it's part of what will set Snap.as apart in the future as a photo blogging platform. For now, you can save a short blurb or a Markdown-formatted essay with each photo, and some of it will be used as the photo's alt text, and it'll be saved for later. Include hashtags and they'll come in handy down the road.

Snap.as will be open to all active Write.as Pro users from day one, and we'll keep it available only to Pro users for the foreseeable future, as we think this product makes that monthly $4 subscription fee go much farther.

We can't wait to show you what we've built (and have planned). Stay tuned here and on Twitter for more updates!