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A few days ago (January 18th) at the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany, WhatsApp’s CEO Jan Koum took the stage for a session with Wired’s Cade Metz, where the company also made a couple of significant announcements, as it is closing in to have 1 billion users — WhatsApp is dropping the US$1 annual “subscription” fee, making the app completely free to use for the first time, and it is also testing commercial tools that lets businesses like airlines and banks to set up WhatsApp profiles for them to easily communicate with their customers.
Facebook-owned WhatsApp said that its decision to ditch the annual subscription fee is partly due to the reality that not everyone has a credit or debit card to facilitate the payment once the first free year has ended. Our knee-jerk reaction would be to predict that WhatsApp will soon introduce 3rd party advertisements in the app itself, to which WhatsApp said “no”:
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. 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.
That means though regular users of WhatsApp get to enjoy the service for free, businesses and organizations will soon have to pay it to have access to almost a billion users worldwide. WhatsApp is currently testing tools for this very purpose — for the companies to broadcast their announcements to whoever’s following their channels, and potentially for you to instantly message your inquiries too. Mind you, we are already getting these messages through SMS these days, but who knows how much the companies are paying the telcos for this service. So instead of paying the telcos, they’ll be paying Facebook now.
For those of you who were wondering, “I’ve never paid WhatsApp for its service before,” you could either be a new user of WhatsApp (perhaps you have switched numbers recently), or you’ve been an iPhone user for a long time.
Since 2009, WhatsApp for the iPhone had always been priced at US$1, while on Android it’s free for the first year and US$1 for every following year. In my case, since I have an iPhone and an Android, my WhatsApp subscription has always been showing as “Lifetime” even when I switched to Android, using the same number. And then on July 16th 2013, when WhatsApp decided to ditch the US$1 price tag for the iPhone, it too has adopted the same annual fee of US$1. However, as a nice gesture, existing WhatsApp users (possibly only on the iPhone) had been given lifetime access to use its service, as long as they keep the same number.
The annual subscription fee had not been holding back on user adoption, as WhatsApp now has over 900 million users. Its decision to ditch any payment whatsoever for regular users will only see its adoption numbers go up even more. If you haven’t see this change reflected on your WhatsApp’s ‘Payment Info’ section, fret not; WhatsApp said that this update will be rolled out “over the next several weeks”.
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