[Free Stuff] WhatsApp is now free. Yay?
If you’ve been hard up paying a dollar a year to use WhatsApp on your phone, you may now rejoice: WhatsApp announced in their blog that they’re now free:
“That’s why we’re happy to announce that WhatsApp will no longer charge subscription fees. For many years, we’ve asked some people to pay a fee for using WhatsApp after their first year. As we’ve grown, we’ve found that this approach hasn’t worked well. Many WhatsApp users don’t have a debit or credit card number and they worried they’d lose access to their friends and family after their first year. So over the next several weeks, we’ll remove fees from the different versions of our app and WhatsApp will no longer charge you for our service.” Source: blog.whatsapp.com
Unfortunately if you’ve already paid for it before they announced it, you’re out US$1 which equals a cheap mug of coffee around here these days. While they’ve gone free, it leads to the speculation of how they’re going to monetise their service.
The most immediate solution would be having in-app ads, something that most phone users detest with a passion though they also emphatically mentioned in their blogpost that:
“Naturally, people might wonder how we plan to keep WhatsApp running without subscription fees and if today’s announcement means we’re introducing third-party ads. The answer is no.” Source: blog.whatsapp.com
The other possible option would be going the enterprise route with security hardened variants of WhatsApp for businesses though this was further elaborated on in the same post that they were exploring options where users get to choose how and which businesses they want to hear from.
This feature hasn’t appeared in WhatsApp yet and it will be interesting to see how they’ll implement this though having the ability to WhatsApp a restaurant to get a dinner booking or your bank to tell them some berk scarpered off with your plastic without having to go through an automated voice messaging system that does a convincing Dalek impression sounds like a godsend. Interesting times indeed.
Source: blog.whatsapp.com
Image of a Huawei Nexus 6P with WhatsApp installed