Whatsapp becomes free, without introducing 3rd party ads

Whatsapp becomes free, without introducing 3rd party ads

| Source: Whatsapp Author: Mark Campbell

Whatsapp becomes free, without introducing 3rd party ads

Over the next few weeks Whatsapp will be updating every version of the application to no longer require a subscription fee, making the platform free for everyone to use and much simpler to use.

This will mean that users do not need to use a credit or debit card to pay Whatsapp and the users will no longer need to worry about their free first year ending.

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. 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.

This news is not just good however, it is great new as the Whatsapp platform will not be including 3rd party ads as an alternate payment structure, meaning that the user experience will not change much.

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.

Whatsapp wants to be seen as a service that businesses can use as an alternative to texting or calling their users when informing them about delayed flights and delivering other information, allowing Whatsapp to earn money without non-business users paying for it.

You can join the discussion on Whatsapp's becoming a free platform on the OC3D Forums.

Whatsapp becomes free to use by without introducing 3rd party ads to the platform. https://t.co/67euSg2FG4 pic.twitter.com/N9Tb6CzrzQ — OC3D (@OC3D) January 18, 2016

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