WhatsApp Now Completely Free, Drops $1 Annual Subscription Fee

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In a move to make their messaging app free and more useful, WhatsApp announced that it will now be skipping out on its subscription charge. Prior to this, the app users are levied a buck annually after one year of free subscription.

"For many years, we've asked some people to pay a fee for using WhatsApp after their first year. As we've grown, we've found that this approach hasn't worked well," WhatsApp wrote on their blog. "So over the next several weeks, we'll remove fees from the different versions of our app and WhatsApp will no longer charge you for our service."

The tech company cited that many of their app users who don't have debit or credit cards could be worrying about not having continuous access after their first year of free subscription due to their lack of means to pay the $1 subscription fee, says a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The team behind the messaging app also assured their users that the move to ditch the annual subscription fee after the first year does not mean third-party ads will be popping out from everywhere from here on."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," the blog added.

But the brand will be exploring other options like new tools that would connect WhatsApp users with businesses and organizations, such as airlines and banks, that they might be interested in communicating with.

"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."

WhatsApp Messenger is a cross-platform mobile messaging app which is available for iPhone, Windows Phone, Android, BlackBerry and Nokia. It has been used by millions of users around the world to communicate with their friends and loved ones without having to pay for an SMS rate for messaging.

On Sept. 4, 2015, Jan Koum, WhatsApp CEO and co-founder, posted on his Facebook account announcing that the messaging app has just surpassed the 900-million mark in terms of monthly active users. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was one of the first to congratulate him. In 2014, the social networking giant bought WhatsApp for a reported amount of $19 billion.