For most of the users of WhatsApp, this wouldn’t make sense as they were already enjoying WhatsApp service for free on their smartphones. However if you’re from one of the developed countries like US, you’d have surely paid for the service extension from the 2nd year at a price of $1. But now WhatsApp has decided to make WhatsApp free for lifetime, no matter what region or country you belong to.
The main reason of removing the subscription is that most of the users don’t have a debit or credit card which was the mode of payment for paying the fee. WhatsApp has mentioned that the approach of charging the fee was not going well.
Now if you are thinking that they will start introducing 3rd party advertisements (or in-app purchases) to generate revenue from the app, then you would be happy to hear that they won’t be doing any thing like this. Instead, they are looking for different revenue models. Models, which are surely much more profitable over the classical monetization options like advertisements.
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.”
Hopefully WhatsApp’s master i.e. Facebook won’t mess up the WhatsApp service by allowing businesses to exploit the millions of smartphone users, a lot of which actively use WhatsApp.