A small tool that does one thing

Why it exists

Snapchat is built around impermanence, and most of the time that is the point. But a clip you want to keep, a Story from a trip, a Spotlight video you want to send to someone who is not on the app — those are ordinary reasons to want a file rather than a moment.

The tools that already did this were mostly hostile: pop-up interstitials, fake progress bars, a download that turned out to be an installer. Snapdown is the version we wanted to use. One input, a list of files, no theatre.

How it works

Snapchat publishes public content to the open web. A Spotlight clip, a public profile and a Highlight reel each have an ordinary web page that anyone can open without logging in. Those pages carry the address of the media file behind them.

When you paste a link, our extractor fetches that public page, finds the media URL and returns it to your browser. Downloading then streams the file through a proxy so it arrives as a properly named attachment instead of opening in a tab. Nothing is re-encoded at any stage, which is why there is no watermark and no quality loss — there is no processing step in which either could be introduced.

A portion of Snapchat's catalogue is delivered as adaptive streams, which store picture and sound as separate files. For those, Snapdown offers to combine the two into one MP4 using a WebAssembly muxer that runs inside your browser. The tracks are copied rather than re-encoded, and neither file is uploaded anywhere to do it.

What it cannot do, on purpose

Snapdown never authenticates against Snapchat. It has no credentials, no session and no way to sign in — yours or anyone's. Everything that follows from that is a deliberate limit rather than a missing feature:

• Private Stories and Friend Stories are unreachable.
• Snaps sent directly to you in a chat are unreachable.
• Group Stories and My Eyes Only are unreachable.
• Content on a private account is unreachable.

If a site claims to do any of that, it either cannot and is lying, or it is asking for your Snapchat password. Do not hand that over to anybody.

What we keep

Nothing worth listing. We do not store the links you paste, we do not keep the media that passes through, and we do not build a profile of your activity. There are no third-party analytics scripts and no ad trackers on this site. The privacy policy spells this out in more detail, and it is short because there is little to say.

Where it can break

Being honest about this: Snapdown reads pages whose internal structure Snapchat can change without notice, and it does so from shared server addresses that Snapchat sometimes rate-limits. So occasionally a link fails when it should have worked. Waiting a minute fixes most of it; the rest we fix at our end. If something is consistently broken,tell us and include the link.

Using it fairly

Saving public content to watch offline is ordinary browsing. Re-uploading someone else's video as your own is not, and no tool changes that. Creators own what they make: ask before you republish, credit them when you share, and take it down if they ask.

Snapdown is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Snap Inc., and Snapchat is their trademark, not ours.