Snapchat plans let you invite up to 200 friends

If you've ever tried to plan a birthday party through a Snapchat group chat and watched it dissolve into forty messages about who's bringing what, you're exactly who this feature was built for.

The Snapchat Plans feature enables users to create an event with a name, date, time, and up to 200 invited friends using Bitmoji art that changes according to guests' responses.

Invitations will go straight into a private conversation with the invitee, enabling the latter to send a response such as "Going", "Maybe", or "Can't Go" without disrupting any ongoing discussion. All this information will be recorded on the “My Plans” page of the user's profile.

You might not have noticed, but Snap says roughly a third of its young US users already default to group chats and DMs to plan real-world hangouts.

That's the gap Snapchat is closing, and it's not subtle about the target: this puts Snapchat in direct competition with Partiful, the invite app that's quietly become the standard for how younger users organise parties, plus Apple's own Invites app, which launched with similar ambitions last year.

According to Snap, the vision is to enable friends to take their chats offline and have some fun together in real life. The features support this mission as well, since plans are designed to be private and invite-only; no information about your party gets revealed beyond those who have been invited.

The upcoming feature will enable users to create plans directly from their chats, without having to go through the additional process of accessing the planner screen.