Every year, Fueled sneaks into Austin a day early to throw a BBQ field trip with 100 of our closest friends in tech. We're priming our grills and stomachs for SXMEAT, and we’re ready to rock. Well almost ready, save for our glorious Snapchat filters. Last year, we created a geofilter with the hashtag #SXSAUSAGE. It yielded these gems (you’re welcome, followers):

But this year, hashtags on filters have been banned, and the pricing went up 6.5 times compared to last year. Plus, users can’t create a geofilter until 30 days out from their desired date. So there we were. One month out from our day of drool-worthy Austin BBQ, and we're just finding out how much we’d have to spend on our beloved, hand crafted, hashtagged geofilters.

Armed with a thoroughly screen-shotted history of our past Snapchat geofilter use, we contacted customer support. Unfortunately, we didn’t get answers. When we asked for specific reasoning for the surge pricing, they said, “The pricing in this area is correct”. Then, we asked them why hashtags are no longer permitted, and they responded with "Hashtags (#) are currently not permitted in Geofilter submissions”. Yep, we know. Why though?

Ryan D. Matzner has a couple thoughts on this saying, "Snapchat's platform doesn't employ hashtags, so maybe they feel it'd degrade the user experience or simply encourage users to write about snapchat content on some social platform that does support hashtags". And after reading this article, we’re thinking that a purchase of Twitter, a.k.a Hashtag Overlord, could finally put Snap on the hashtag map. Crazier things have happened. Either way we cut it, they’re coming up short while we’re trying to live our best SXSW lives.