Two great news. One is good and the other is bad. The good is WhatsApp would be dropping its yearly recurring fee of $1 according to founder Jan Koum in a news on stage at this year’s DLD conference.
Narrating that the one year recurring fee might not make much sense which instead prevents many from using the service especially in places where there aren’t access to card payments.
If WhatsApp wants to become the messaging service of the masses (and it’s well on its way), it needs to be entirely free, much like most of its competition.
Mr Koum had said that this was a very big obstacle to some of the users if the service. The recurring payment wasn’t really working well for the company.
In some cases, the fear of the service suddenly ending overnight is a great barrier to the users which woul not actually be doing any favor to the company at large.
If you’ve ever used WhatsApp with more than one phone, you might be even more familiar with the subscription screen, often every time you install it.
Another good news is that the subscription is ending right now even though it might take a couple of weeks to filter things out through versions of the application.
Now onto the Bad news, if you’ve just resubscribe…like yesterday, then forget about your cash because you ain’t never getting it back (Subscription are nonrefundable)
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Although the adless application is thought to be in doubt on survival as it just ended its monetary channel. The concern hangs about how WhatsApp would keep it’s living within the Facebook family.
Most likely, this will mean taking a page out of its parental playbook, and leaning on its vast userbase to entice business partnerships (i.e. paid / official corporate accounts).
Although WhatsApp had convinced us that Adverts ain’t never coming up but are those words gonna be retained as the only thing that keeps it away is gone?
WhatsApp still says “No! Ads ain’t never coming” or probably not coming yet.
“we will test tools that allow you to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organizations that you want to hear from.”
It’s also likely to continue to slowly overtake other functions of your phone, in a bid to earn more users / relevance. Many businesses are already using WhatsApp to communicate with customers, so no change really, just something you can expect to see more of in the future.
Via: ReCode
Source: WhatsApp, Engadget
image credit: Crackberry
