4 ms·

Well it used to cost like $1 per year and that covered operating expenses many times over, yet..

Ayesh 6y ago
I wonder what is the true server cost of one user to the system. Of course, the initial costs and human costs are quite high, but in a running system, what could be the cost? 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.
chii 6y ago
which they waived very often. I had whatsapp when there was officially a $1 per year cost of subscription, but the first year was free - and then the next, and the next, the "fees" kept getting waived. Then facebook acquired them, and removed the mention of fees altogether.
mrweasel 6y ago
In that case they could easily adjust pricing to match each country and put a positive spin on it. Let people in Europe pay €5 a year, but tell them that they are finasing 5 users in Africa.
- ulfw 6y ago
  Erm yea they still wouldn't pay for this as long as other free alternatives are available. Messengers are a commodity product in terms of functionality. 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...)
  - josefx 6y ago
    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.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      It wasn't really paid. They claimed it was but everyone I know always got the charge waived, which makes sense when you learn it was only ever meant to be a scaling break (see my other comment).
      - rerx 5y ago
        I paid that Euro a couple of times.
        thu2111 5y ago
        Huh, TIL! It'd be interesting to see what percentage of users got waivers vs charges over time.
        rerx 5y ago
        I found one charge of 0.89 Eur in April 2013. Probably the first year was free and then I paid once. Maybe they charged me just a single time after all. Quite a bargain to be honest (before the Facebook acquisition at least).
  - mrweasel 6y ago
    Yeah, I guess you're right. 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.
thu2111 6y ago
No it didn't. The only reason they charged, or claimed they would charge, was to slow down growth when they were falling behind with their server scaling efforts. The founders of WhatsApp discuss this in an interview somewhere. It was an anti growth hack, not a business model.
- roachpepe 5y ago
  Never thought to think about it this way - back in the day I just assumed they are most likely just trying to get more visibility with the news of the app going behind a paywall making conversation - and then later playing the "ok you win -card" and reversing the decision (with the customers are more important than money feels). Though back then there was no Signal or any other real mainstream usable alternative, and also Zuck hadn't bought them out yet I believe. 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!

I wonder what is the true server cost of one user to the system. Of course, the initial costs and human costs are quite high, but in a running system, what could be the cost? 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.

chii 6y ago

which they waived very often. I had whatsapp when there was officially a $1 per year cost of subscription, but the first year was free - and then the next, and the next, the "fees" kept getting waived. Then facebook acquired them, and removed the mention of fees altogether.

mrweasel 6y ago

In that case they could easily adjust pricing to match each country and put a positive spin on it. Let people in Europe pay €5 a year, but tell them that they are finasing 5 users in Africa.

ulfw 6y ago
Erm yea they still wouldn't pay for this as long as other free alternatives are available. Messengers are a commodity product in terms of functionality. 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...)
- josefx 6y ago
  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.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    It wasn't really paid. They claimed it was but everyone I know always got the charge waived, which makes sense when you learn it was only ever meant to be a scaling break (see my other comment).
    - rerx 5y ago
      I paid that Euro a couple of times.
      - thu2111 5y ago
        Huh, TIL! It'd be interesting to see what percentage of users got waivers vs charges over time.
        rerx 5y ago
        I found one charge of 0.89 Eur in April 2013. Probably the first year was free and then I paid once. Maybe they charged me just a single time after all. Quite a bargain to be honest (before the Facebook acquisition at least).
- mrweasel 6y ago
  Yeah, I guess you're right. 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.

thu2111 6y ago

No it didn't. The only reason they charged, or claimed they would charge, was to slow down growth when they were falling behind with their server scaling efforts. The founders of WhatsApp discuss this in an interview somewhere. It was an anti growth hack, not a business model.

roachpepe 5y ago
Never thought to think about it this way - back in the day I just assumed they are most likely just trying to get more visibility with the news of the app going behind a paywall making conversation - and then later playing the "ok you win -card" and reversing the decision (with the customers are more important than money feels). Though back then there was no Signal or any other real mainstream usable alternative, and also Zuck hadn't bought them out yet I believe. 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!