WhatsApp currently charges an annual subscription fee of $0.99, the fee is charged after you having been using the service for 12 months and now the company plans to ditch the fee.
The news comes from WhatsApp founder and CEO Jan Koum, who announced today that they will be getting rid of of the $0.99 fee.
The reason that the fee is being dropped is that the company doesn’t want to stop people who dont have access to credit cards from using the service.
Naturally, people might wonder how we plan to keep WhatsApp running without subscription fees and if today’s announcement means we’re introducing third-party ads. The answer is no. Starting this year, we will test tools that allow you to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organizations that you want to hear from. That could mean communicating with your bank about whether a recent transaction was fraudulent, or with an airline about a delayed flight. We all get these messages elsewhere today – through text messages and phone calls – so we want to test new tools to make this easier to do on WhatsApp, while still giving you an experience without third-party ads and spam.
It will take a few weeks for the annual subscription fee to be dropped, if you have already paid the fee then you will not get a refund.
Source re/code
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