WhatsApp cancels subscription fee, announces social media banking as possible revenue source

Whatsapp announced that there will be no more yearly subscription fee for its over half a billion regular, active users, the company also announced that they will be looking for other ways of making money giving the example of embedding tools to allow the application’s users to communicate with their banks.

This announcement was made by the company, through its official blog, where it sighted the main reason of removing the fee as a way to do away with inconveniencing their users.

“Nearly a billion people around the world today rely on WhatsApp to stay in touch with their friends and family. From a new dad in Indonesia sharing photos with his family, to a student in Spain checking in with her friends back home, to a doctor in Brazil keeping in touch with her patients, people rely on WhatsApp to be fast, simple and reliable,” the blog read.

“That’s why we’re happy to announce that WhatsApp will no longer charge subscription fees. For many years, we’ve asked some people to pay a fee for using WhatsApp after their first year. 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,” it continued.

Unlike most popular messaging apps, WhatsApp has been charging a $1 (Ksh. 102) annual subscription fee after your first year of using the app. The fee was being charged by Whatsapp instead of the use of third party ads as a way of making money, an issue that the company touched on in the blog post saying:

“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,” the blog assured.

The company announced that starting this year, it will test tools that allow people to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organizations that want to hear from them; giving an example of enabling people to communicate with their banks through the app to know things such us, whether a recent transaction was fraudulent.

“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,” the post read. “We hope you enjoy what’s coming to WhatsApp, and we look forward to your feedback.” It concluded.