Facebook-owned WhatsApp to stop charging $1 subscription fee

The company revealed the move on a blog post, confirming the decision would apply to WhatsApp’s entire userbase – that’s almost a billion people.

This sounds a lot like the type of services that Facebook’s Messenger app has been focused on developing since an announcement previous year at its f8 conference.

However, Koum promised that WhatsApp would not follow Facebook and Instagram in introducing adverts, saying that it would fund itself with business accounts. They said that many users did not have a credit or debit card, and after the first free year, they would no longer be able to communicate with their friends and family.

Koum said WhatsApp was now developing features which would allow companies, such as American Airlines and Bank of America, to communicate with customers at the request of the user. Although WhatsApp will stop charging customers from today, it will take a few weeks for the payment UI in apps to go away as app updates roll out to the store. The messaging app has traditionally been free for one year, after which users had to spend fork out 99 cents/69p a year to keep using it. Zuckerberg earlier said he expected the service to contribute to the bottom line of the company, but not till it hits about one billion users.

However the company have now admitted that, “As we’ve grown, we’ve found that this approach hasn’t worked well”. WhatsApp says that these will only be from groups and businesses that you want to hear from, though, so it will be interesting to see what that means when the changes start rolling out.

Well Whatsapp is now joining the endless list of free apps.

WhatsApp admitted that charging a $0.99 fee per year “was not working”.

Previously, WhatsApp had been free for the first year, with the fee charged for every subsequent year. This sort of challenge is more prevalent in emerging markets where WhatsApp has the majority of its 900 million subscribers.