WhatsApp ditches annual subscription, promises to stay ad free

WhatsApp on Monday announced plans to drop its annual subscription fees as it looks for alternative revenue models.

In an official blog post, the massively popular instant messaging service, announced that the decision had been made after it realised that many of its users “don’t have a debit or credit card number.” and “worried they’d lose access to their friends and family after their first year”.

“Over the next several weeks,” its says “we’ll remove fees from the different versions of our app and WhatsApp will no longer charge you for our service”.

In the same post it sought to address speculation that removing subscription fees would result in it having to accept third-party ads.

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Instead, it’ll be launching a set of tools which will allow you 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,” it says, “or with an airline about a delayed flight”.

WhatsApp’s rationale is that we already get these messages via SMS and phone calls, so it may as well take over these functions for the corporate space in the same way as it has between its everyday users.

It’s unclear whether users will have to opt in to the companies they want to be able to communicate with, but if they’re based on algorithms around your data, then it’s difficult to take WhatsApp’s promise that it’ll still give you an “experience without third-party ads and spam” at face value.