They had ~50 people at time of acquisition. Assuming a steep expense level of $18,500/employee/month, total run rate cost was at ~$11M/year. At a $1 a new user (were at 600M users and growing fast), WhatsApp was almost definitely cash flow positive at time of acquisition.

Sure, but they took VC money. :-( VC and Wall Street money are poison to privacy products.

I wish I could get myself to take the hit and uninstall all my surveillance capitalism but I'm taking a middle road approach => install signal, try to talk to my friends on signal > whatsapp > messenger, try to persuade people to move to signal. Has worked sometimes. I ask anyone else too weak to go detox to try the same thing.

I made a clean break (never installed WhatsApp in the first place, in fact). I got many friends to install Signal and use it to contact me, but only since other people have started using it as their preferred messaging app as well is it reaching critical mass - friends who are not on Signal are now starting to use it due to FOMO.

So what I'm trying to say is: I've seen your strategy working, so it's a good one that doesn't require you to make too many personal sacrifices.

I tried Signal and it was hopelessly broken unfortunately. No matter what I did I could not get it to consistently send push notifications when I received a message which is practically the second most important feature of a chat app.

How long ago? My group of friends switched to Signal a few weeks back and there have been no issues with push notifications for me on iOS. It might be worth another look if it's been a while.

Only a couple of months ago (second time I tried, both times same issue). This was on Android btw. To be clear I meant the push notification on my own device didn't work (reading back I can see what I said could be misinterpreted). I suspect it had something to do with aggressive background process management but even switching everything to low power efficiency settings/ always on didn't work consistently. I've moved on.

Nobody actually paid for WhatsApp. At least, nobody I know off. They supposedly required you to pay 1€ a year after the first year, but everybody kept using it for free forever. I'd say they never made any money.

> Nobody actually paid for WhatsApp. At least, nobody I know off.

People did pay. Its just that the charging was somewhat selective. Obviously you and your friends weren't in the group that was selected.

Originally, it was a paid app ($1) on the iPhone. Eventually, that was dropped in favor of using in-app billing to actually charge the $1/year on Android... but this was only enforced in a few selected countries at first. Once the Facebook acquisition happened, this effort was dropped. If it hadn't happened, then charging users would have expanded gradually over time.

Or people would just mass jump to Viber or Telegram or any other messaging app...

I can tell you with confidence that very few users in eastern Europe would pay even an euro for an app that used to be free and has free alternatives.

In fact my friends and I discussed that exact particular scenario when we once got a notification from WhatsApp about future payments.

Talking about things is not the same as doing the things. The network effect is pretty strong in messaging apps.

Same here in Spain.

I mean, let's be honest, it's just a chat application. It is almost trivial to build and maintain. And since it uses your phone number, there is no friction to switch to another app--if they decided to charge for it, Telegram would eat it alive in months.

> It is almost trivial to build and maintain.

I'm interested to know what you've made or helped to make that is more complex and more difficult to maintain than whatsapp.

I find it amusing just how many people make this assumption up-front. Probably because its one of those "problems" that seems simple on the surface, until you start digging deeper. This gets especially true once you take into account offline delivery, presence management, delivered/read receipts, group/broadcast use cases, efficient use of the network, complexities of reliable/efficient cross-platform media transfer across a variety of formats, and... robust end-to-end encryption.

Please don't do this here.

I ended up paying at least once, maybe twice before they made it "free".

I paid too. $1 is nothing for an ad free service. I knew friends who paid too.

They had $7m in the bank (from this $1 fee) when they were acquired if memory serves me correct.

Yep, been using it on iOS for years and have never paid a single cent.

This.

But not on iOS, they had to pay.

They made it free on iOS too one year before they were acquired by Facebook: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/whatsapp-on-ios-now-free

Not that I support this. But it does help you expand tremendously in developing markets.