While WhatsApp was continuously renewing the services for its customers for free, there was always the fear that they would eventually charge for the service, until now, when the company has officially made it free to use forever.
WhatsApp has officially announced that it will no longer charge subscription fees for using the WhatsApp Instant Messaging service. Further, it also claims to have no plans to introduce third-party ads to compensate for the costs incurred. This is perceived to be a good news for the over 900 million users that the service had registered as of late 2015.
Revealing its plans to monetize, WhatsApp said it will start testing tools so that you can use the messenger to communicate with businesses and organizations such as banks, to know if your recent transaction was fraudulent, or chat with an airline to ask about a delayed flight. While, the users in India were exempted from the charge, users globally had to pay $0.99 annually to use the service.
Speaking about the move, WhatsApp said, “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.”
