People paid for WhatsApp before Facebook bought it and it was successfull. That is a fact spyware peddlers and their fanboys can't argue away.

> 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.