Popular instant messaging application WhatsApp is doing away with its $0.99 (R16.59) annual fee as it explores new services.
WhatsApp founder Jan Koum made the announcement at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany on Monday.
The messaging service – which was bought by Facebook for $19bn in 2014. – has also explained the move in a blog post.
“For many years, we’ve asked some people to pay a fee for using WhatsApp after their first year,” says the WhatsApp blog post.
“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,” the blog post added.
Since its launch in 2009, WhatsApp has been free of advertisements and it’s move to drop its subscription fee will prompt questions about its business model.
But WhatsApp plans to keep its messaging service ad-free and explore other services.
“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,” said the company.
“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,” said the company.
WhatsApp has rocketed in usage to over 900 million worldwide users amid the service offering cheaper messaging and voice offerings over data networks. In South Africa, WhatsApp has 10 million users, according to a recent report by World Wide Worx and Fuseware.
The popularity of WhatsApp has further caught the attention of South African mobile networks which have asked Parliament to probe possible regulation of over-the-top services in South Africa.
