Well it used to cost like $1 per year and that covered operating expenses many times over, yet..
They are E2E, so it is unlikely that the servers need to do any heavy processing. I see that I unused about 3GB of data for about a year, and with 3GB costing $0.30 even at AWS extortion prices, $1 seems like a good estimate.
But you might be right, if the snowball was about to go out of control this would have been a smart way to throttle growth, a little uncertainty would do the trick and is also conveniently quickly forgotten without significant PR loss. Good angle!
If the captive audience walks elsewhere the messengers dies (see Yahoo Messenger, MSN, AOL, the 250 different ones Google had at some point or other...)
> Messengers are a commodity product in terms of functionality.
They also where when whats app was a paid service. Yet the complaint against signal, etc. is that they are unusable because they are not nearly as full featured, hard to use and that people would rather continue to use WhatsApp for the network effect alone.
It just seems silly that people won't pay something as low as $5 - $10 per year for a service they use daily, while paying for multiple streaming services, cable TV or cell phone plans where they mostly use the data.
Sure $10 doesn't represent the same value across the world, but I don't see an issue in letting the western world pay more. US users is already worth more to Facebook than someone in Africa.