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toast0HNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

> Supposedly about a billion people paid for that at the time

> Supposedly about a billion people paid for that at the time. (I worked for WhatsApp from 2011-2019) From that article, user count was about 900 Million when the fee was ended; user count was about 450 M in Feb 2014 when the acquisition was announced [1]. Either way, it is a mistake to think everyone was paying. A) Some people still had lifetime accounts from when the app was $1 for iPhone, or from the typical late December limited time free for iPhone promotions. Windows Phone got marked as lifetime for a while due to a bug/oversight that took a while to get noticed. B) Enforcement was limited. A lot of users wouldn't have had a payment method that WhatsApp could accept; demanding payment when there's no way to pay isn't good for anybody. For a long time, we didn't even implement payment enforcement; we'd go through and extend subscriptions for a year, initially by manual script, then through automation. When we did build payment enforcement, I think we only set it on for Spain and maybe the US. …

Original discussionWhatsApp introduces ads in its app1,027 source comments · at import
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throw0101cHN

> I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. Depends on the price. I'm guessing lots of folks are paying $1/month to Apple to upgrade from the free 5GB tier of iCloud storage to get to the 50GB tier. WhatsApp charged people $1 per year before being acquired by Facebook: * https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/ Supposedly about a billion people paid for that at the time. Even if they went to $1 per month, that'd be fairly cheap (and WhatsApp ran fairly lean, personnel-wise: fifty FTEs).

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eddythompson80HN

> Windows Phone got marked as lifetime for a while due to a bug/oversight that took a while to get noticed. Huh, is that what it was... I had a Windows Phone 2012-2013 and I think I signed up for WhatsApp on it and I remember chatting with a friend on it and he was talking about the $1 per year thing and I went to check, and it said I have lifetime and I was confused how I ended up with that, but was using it so lightly that I didn't bother to look into why. I figured maybe there was a promotion the day I signed up or something.

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pmontraHN

This is the story from the point of view of a user: One day the app asked me to pay. It was less than 1 Euro per year, I think. I never associated a credit card to the app store (Android) so I did not pay and waited to see what would happen. It kept asking for money for a few days but it kept working, so I thought they were not serious about it. Then it stopped asking. It started asking for money again after a few months but I remembered what happened before so I waited again. It kept working and eventually stopped asking for money. This pattern repeated a few times until maybe the time FB bought it. I believe that if it stopped working people would have switched en masse to another app, maybe Telegram? We also had Viber and probably FB messenger too. Switches happened many times in the 90s and early 2000s. I remember AIM, ICQ, MSN, then Skype. Whole networks of people moved to the next …

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KoolKat23HN

If I recall right, WhatsApp tookaway our lifetime subscriptions like a year after buying it, saying it wasn't necessary or something and put everyone all on the same plan.

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dieortinHN

> When we did build payment enforcement, I think we only set it on for Spain and maybe the US. Can I ask why Spain specifically?

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