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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 mon
by leephillips 6y ago
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?
- PetitPrince 6y agoInitially WhatsApp (before Facebook acquisition) had a (cheap!) one time fee.
- leephillips 6y agoOh, I guess I was late to the party.
- RobertoG 6y agoI think that was only true for the Apple store, not for Android.
- vxNsr 6y agoAnd 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.
- OnlyLys 6y agoI 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.
- sefrost 6y agoDid it ever actually charge anyone? I remember agreeing to something like $1 per year but never being charged.
- OnlyLys 6y agoNow 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.
- jbverschoor 6y agoIt was $1 / year
- celticninja 6y agothe app was 99p when i first downloaded it I think.
- pmontra 6y agoThe 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.
- vl 6y agoOn 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.