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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you completely, but “Most of us paid some money for the app”: I didn’t know it was possible to pay for WhatsApp. On what platforms does it cost money?

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I used to pay for a WhatsApp subscription. I remember it being a small amount per year. But they did it away with it after Facebook bought them.

Did it ever actually charge anyone? I remember agreeing to something like $1 per year but never being charged.

Now that you mention it, I do remember being given free extensions to the WhatsApp service. But at some point I recall the extension had run out and I had to pay for it.

It was $1 / year

On iPhone it was $1, since it was easy to take the money. On Android, where most users didn’t have payment setup, it was free with the promise to eventually charge $1 in the future, which they never did. Then Facebook bought them for $19B.

The app on Android has always been free. Sometimes it asked 1 Euro to keep working. I always ignored it. I should also have had to setup payment on Google Play as I never bought an app or anything there. I remember that it stopped working for a few days at least once but Whatsapp was not as important as it is now. I waited and it welcomed me back again. Did I see their bluff?

If they'd start asking for money now there will be a mass migration to any other free service. We did it many times with instant messengers on PCs in the 90s and the early 2000s. People ponders about $10 vs $9 but they take no time moving from $1 to free.

Initially WhatsApp (before Facebook acquisition) had a (cheap!) one time fee.

Oh, I guess I was late to the party.

I think that was only true for the Apple store, not for Android.

And then it was an annual fee, of $1 billed to your cell service provider, people had a much easier time parting with $1 at some future point on their cellphone bill which anyways is dynamic vs $1 now in the app. for the team size the projected amount they’d make was fine.

iirc it had like 500mil users and less than 50 ppl in the company.

the app was 99p when i first downloaded it I think.

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