No More Annual Fees for WhatsApp Users (No Ads, Either)

At the Digital Life Design conference on Monday, WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum revealed that, in the coming weeks, the widely-used instant messaging service will scrap the annual subscription fee it charges from its users. Well WhatsApp announced yesterday that they will no longer be charging customers the annual $1 subscription fee!

WhatsApp will continue its no-ads policy, despite dropping the subscription fee.

WhatsApp, the popular Facebook-owned messaging service, is dropping its $1 fee that some users still must pay in order to use the mobile service. “As we’ve grown, we’ve found that this approach hasn’t worked well”, the post said. WhatsApp stated they would make WhatsApp free for all users rolling out over the next several weeks.

“Many WhatsApp users don’t have a debit or credit card number and they anxious they’d lose access to their friends and family after their first year”, the post read.

In the two years since WhatsApp became a Facebook property, the company hasn’t had to put a lot of time and effort into monetization, Koum said.

“We all get these messages elsewhere today – through text messages and phone calls – so we want to test new tools to make this easier to do on WhatsApp, while still giving you an experience without third-party ads and spam”, the company added. This doesn’t mean they will be recouping that money through advertising either, they explicitly say they will not do that, though that’s not to say it may change in future.

Koum gave examples like banks alerting and chatting with customers about fraudulent charges, airlines broadcasting flight delays, or people making reservations at a restaurant through WhatsApp.

For music, messaging apps are complementary to rather than replacements for social networks like Facebook and Twitter, but there is clearly plenty of potential to be explored in the former – especially those with the biggest reach.

With over 900 million monthly active users, WhatsApp has a dominating position in the markets as it gears up to touch the 1Billion users mark in the months to follow.