For those who make use of WhatsApp, this could be a great news, while to some others who haven’t previously noticed the annual fee that WhatsApp charges, this will make no difference. However, WhatsApp — in their tender mercies and goodness of heart — have made some reflections and deemed it better to remove the annual fee of $1 that comes with the service after the one year free period.
WhatsApp is now going to be a free service for as long as possible. The announcement reads “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 Whats-App will no longer charge you for our service.”
One can only but wonder what prompted this generosity and how WhatsApp plans on maintaining its service without taking money from the service users. We cannot tell what is going on in the minds of Whats-App, but whatever prompted this decision, I am quite certain more than a handful of users are extremely grateful for it.
WhatsApp has stated that it has no intentions to use this development to rip money out of people’s pockets. The company gave us a hint as to what they will be working on instead in the announcement that was released.
“Starting this year, we will test tools that allow you to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organizations that you want to hear from. That could mean communicating with your bank about whether a recent transaction was fraudulent, or with an airline about a delayed flight. 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 Whats-App, while still giving you an experience without third party ads and spam.”
Even with the new development of hacking off the annual $1 fee, there is no sign of WhatsApp giving a refund to customers who recently paid for the service.
According to Jan Koum, the co-founder and CEO of Whats-App, during the conference he made mention of concerns that include “not wanting people to think that their communications with the world will be cut off.” He also stated that the subscription fee “really doesn’t work that well in a lot of countries.” This sudden affection Whats-App is showing towards its users is not only shocking but quite scary. The question remains:How does WhatsApp plan to generate income for its service maintenance?
WhatsApp merged with Facebook, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that he expects Whats-App to add substance to the “company’s bottom line.” But this feat would not be accomplished until the service attained a total of 1 billion users. The CEO of WhatsApp, however, confirmed on Monday that the service has crossed the 900 million line and is hopeful for the future.
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