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Comment by octorian | Hacker News Reader

> Nobody actually paid for WhatsApp. At least, nobody I know off.

People did pay. Its just that the charging was somewhat selective. Obviously you and your friends weren't in the group that was selected.

Originally, it was a paid app ($1) on the iPhone. Eventually, that was dropped in favor of using in-app billing to actually charge the $1/year on Android... but this was only enforced in a few selected countries at first. Once the Facebook acquisition happened, this effort was dropped. If it hadn't happened, then charging users would have expanded gradually over time.

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Or people would just mass jump to Viber or Telegram or any other messaging app...

I can tell you with confidence that very few users in eastern Europe would pay even an euro for an app that used to be free and has free alternatives.

In fact my friends and I discussed that exact particular scenario when we once got a notification from WhatsApp about future payments.

Talking about things is not the same as doing the things. The network effect is pretty strong in messaging apps.

Same here in Spain.

I mean, let's be honest, it's just a chat application. It is almost trivial to build and maintain. And since it uses your phone number, there is no friction to switch to another app--if they decided to charge for it, Telegram would eat it alive in months.

> It is almost trivial to build and maintain.

I'm interested to know what you've made or helped to make that is more complex and more difficult to maintain than whatsapp.

I find it amusing just how many people make this assumption up-front. Probably because its one of those "problems" that seems simple on the surface, until you start digging deeper. This gets especially true once you take into account offline delivery, presence management, delivered/read receipts, group/broadcast use cases, efficient use of the network, complexities of reliable/efficient cross-platform media transfer across a variety of formats, and... robust end-to-end encryption.

I ended up paying at least once, maybe twice before they made it "free".

I paid too. $1 is nothing for an ad free service. I knew friends who paid too.

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