WhatsApp Now Free, to Start Adding Businesses

The world’s most popular messenger, WhatsApp, has announced that it will make the service completely free. Along with this, they announced that they will start testing features that will allow customers to communicate with businesses and other organizations.

WhatsApp has decided to stop charging users $0.99 per annum in countries like the U.S. and the U.K. Previously, users got the messenger for free for the first year, however, were charged after the first year. The company said that this approach was highly unsuccessful. This is because most countries still don’t support mobile payments that well. This is unlike the U.S. and U.K. where most of the population has access to credit and debit cards to make mobile payments.

“Today, we are announcing that WhatsApp is going to be free to users. We aren’t going to charge a dollar a year anymore,” WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum said at Digital-Life-Design in Munich.

WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook for a whopping $22 Billion in 2014. Now, if you’re Facebook and want to buy a company for $22 Billion, you have to atleast make that much, right? Wrong. WhatsApp has only made around $20 million before Facebook acquired the company, and that too, to cover the costs of establishing the service. After the acquisition, Koum stated that the company needs to focus on growing its user base.

Growing at around 1 million users per day, WhatsApp has reached around 990 million users, still short of 1 Billion. But consider this, 1 Billion is around 1/7^th of the world’s population. That’s still a lot of users! When Facebook acquired WhatsApp, it had around 450 million active monthly users. In late 2015, WhatsApp had around 900 Million active monthly users.

The company reassures customers that they won’t be introducing advertisements, because, well, advertisements are not cool. Instead, they plan to introduce ways to allow communication between customers and businesses. Businesses will probably pay to communicate with customers.

"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 WhatsApp, while still giving you an experience without third-party ads and spam,” WhatsApp said.