WhatsApp on Monday said that it will waive its annual subscription fee over the next several weeks as it has not worked well. “For many years, we have asked some people to pay a fee for using WhatsApp after their first year. As we have grown, we have found that this approach hasn’t worked well,” said WhatsApp in a blog post.

“Naturally, people might wonder how we plan to keep WhatsApp running without subscription fees and if today’s announcement means we are introducing third-party advertisements. The answer is no,” said the WhatsApp blog post.

“We will test tools that allow you to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organisations that you want to hear from.” Promising zero third-party advertisement and spam, WhatsApp said, “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.”

This strategy sounds uncannily familiar to the strategy adopted by Facebook for its Messenger service. “Messenger works better in places that have good data connectivity, while WhatsApp, by contrast, has achieved much of its success by appealing to price-sensitive consumers who want to avoid paying a fee for every text-message sent.”

“Many WhatsApp users don’t have a debit or credit card number and they worried they would lose access to their friends and family after their first year,” said the blogpost.

WhatsApp, offers free text, picture and video messages, has been slowly working to develop end-to-end encrypted communications services for more than a year. It has already introduced full encryption for users on Android phones. "We are a couple of months away from calling it done," Koum said, noting that once completed, WhatsApp will represent the world's largest service offering completely private messaging. "Soon we will be able to talk more about this," he said.

WhatsApp was founded by Ukrainian immigrants to America Jan Koum and Brian Acton in 2009, WhatsApp got acquired by social media giant Facebook for $19 billion in 2014. Both Koum and Acton were former employees of technology company Yahoo.

By Premji