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.
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.
We hope you enjoy what's coming to WhatsApp, and we look forward to your feedback.