Nice coincidence, I was thinking about the sale yesterday.
IIRC, a while before the sale Whatsapp tried to introduce some meagre subscription, on the order of dozens of cents, which got a lot of backlash. Then, a bit after that, it got sold.
The servers don't pay for themselves, and if the user base wasn't going to pay for use, money had to be manifested in another way.
WhatsApp on iPhone was initially $1 to download, but had frequent sales. WhatsApp on other platforms was free to download woth a $1/year subscription... But subscription enforcement was uneven.
I started in 2011, and the subscription language was present, but there was no mechanism for payment. Then we put payment into Android, but frequently would extend all subscriptions. At some point the iPhone model flipped to match the rest, but if you had registered with iPhone before the switch, your account was set to lifetime.
I don't know the timeline, but towards the end there was a small list of countries where we would actually enforce loss of service for about a week when the subscription ended. After a week, we'd extend the subscription for a while anyway, because it was probably hard to pay (we tried to pick subscription enforcement countries where payment was readily accessible, but lots of people don't have a compatible mode of payment even if they have the means to pay)
We were told the company was cash flow positive, the public GAAP numbers look bad, but a large part of that is stock based compensation; a small part is accounting treatment for the lifetime accounts.
Also, it's important to note that the acquisition happened before real time voice and video calling launched and running servers for that was expected to be expensive.
WhatsApp was a 99 pence/cents app for years before it was sold to Meta. It didn't become free until some time after the sale.
Being paid never hurt its adoption at all in the UK. Teenagers like me were perfectly happy to pay 99p to get inter-platform IM.
> Being paid never hurt its adoption at all in the UK. Teenagers like me were perfectly happy to pay 99p to get inter-platform IM.
To offer a counter example, it definitely did in Venezuela, at least in the beginning, where it initially lost dominance to BBM
Back then online payments were not that common, and most cards had weird restrictions on using USD in general
In the US, it was advertised as $1/year, but I recall never having to pay it.
> Speaking at the DLD conference in Bavaria, Jan Koum confirmed that the $0.99 annual fee will be scrapped, effective immediately. Previously, WhatsApp had been free for the first year, with the fee charged for every subsequent year. Long-term users of the iOS version were given free use for life, as a thanks for paying a fee to download the app when it had a one-off charge.
* https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/18/whatsapp-...