Whatsapp never really did this. This is a common misconception especially around here. Whatsapp did $10M in revenue in 2013 and $15M in the first half of 2014. This is with a user base of 400M active users at the beginning of 2014 and 700M active users at the beginning of 2015 (and getting to 950M, 1.2B, and 1.5B over the next three years).

When Whatsapp did charge for iOS users, it was a one time payment as well. So not yearly regardless.

The app wouldn’t have the popularity it does have if it charged everyone $1 a year. That’s significant to some people vs others. Especially when looking at WhatsApp’s global user base.

Whatsapp was operating at a loss during its high growth time period before the Facebook acquisition.

It’s called Threema:

https://threema.ch/en

(Signal is free, though, and Open Source …)

WhatsApp didn’t have end-to-end encryption when they were using the subscription model though.