WhatsApp founder, Jan Koum has announced that the company is dropping the service’s annual subscription fee in an effort to remove the barriers some users faced in using the service.
” Koum said Monday, speaking at the DLD conference in Munich. He noted that while a buck a year might not sound like much, access to credit cards is not ubiquitous. “We just don’t want people to think at some point their communication to the world will be cut off.”
Koum, who was speaking at the DLD conference in Munich on Monday, said: “It really doesn’t work that well”, while stating that paying a dollar every year might not sound like much, but access to credit cards is not ubiquitous.
“We just don’t want people to think at some point their communication to the world will be cut off.”
Here’s what WhatsApp is saying about that, according to a company blog post:
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.
