The biggest online messaging service, WhatsApp is now completely free for its users. Announcing this, the founder Jan Koum suggested that this step was taken to increase the ease of use for the users. According to him although the subscription plan was really low cost but the process to pay for it was not that simple.
But since WhatsApp has been made free, the company is going to adopt another way to make money. In an official blog post, WhatsApp said that,
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. Starting this year, we will test tools that allow you to use WhatsApp 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, or with an airline about a delayed flight. 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.
This is exactly like the service introduced by Facebook’s Messenger. This shows the obvious influence of Facebook over WhatsApp.
I am now very happy with this