That was its fate anyway.

Some things just can't really make money unless they do it in scummy ways (or we haven't found a viable alternative or a way to protect them).

Public instant messengers, public forums, public file hosting, public image hosting.

Whatsapp used to charge 1 eur or usd per year per user.

Assuming a 20% vat, that’s $800M in yearly revenue. If you spend $500k per engineer per year, you’re still left with $775M to handle infrastructure and all other expenses.

Whatsapp would have been sustainable without fb. That’s the regret.

Facebook to WhatsApp team in the acquisition negotiations: "If you don't sell to us, we'll build our own and offer it for free"

And they would have been out of business sooner or later. There are enough people wanting to save that one dollar.

There are plenty of other ways they could have made money that weren't scummy and didnt require hitting up every user for $1.

Business accounts, facilitating p2p payments (minus a scummy new coin), etc.

Sustainability would have been possible in all sorts of ways even though massive levels of profits (in any company) inevitably means being scummy.

Facebook now have to maintain Messenger AND WhatsApp. And Insta also has chat. So I disagree that FB could have killed WA.

I’m tempted to go further. FB bought WA because it would have killed their ad business.

> If you don't sell to us, we'll build our own and offer it for free

Weren't they already doing that? Facebook Messenger officially launched in 2011 (essentially an upgrade to Facebook's built-in chat functionality which existed before that) and was free, yet Whatsapp continued to grow.

Exactly. Facebook bought WhatsApp’s users like cattle on auction. WhatsApp guys just needed the right price offer. Now with pseudo tech posts like the current they are trying to mask it’s public image behind some ancient tech innovation from it’s past…

WA Management was misled by Facebook about what FB wanted to do with WA. I agree that you'd have to pretty naive to believe FB but it's not like WA founders sold solely because of money.

I think you would have to be pretty naive to think WA founders were above having a price at which they would sell solely for the money.

WhatsApp founder Brian Acton left 850 million USD on the table when he left Facebook prematurely in protest of Facebook's lies about the vision they had for WhatsApp after its acquisition. After that he donated 50 million USD to the Signal foundation.

You are very naively assuming it would actually reach 1B users if it was paid.

Technically, but GP is allocating over 95% of post-tax revenue to everything other than engineer salaries, which is probably extremely generous.

WhatsApp had 200M users in February 2013[1], which was a year before they were acquired by Facebook. Perhaps they wouldn't have gotten to 1B users without Facebook, but I'm sure they still would've grown in the last ~8 years, and fewer users likely results in lower costs. My guess is they would still be doing very well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp

Even before the sale, most of the customers are non paying. They are offering the service for free in countries with largest userbase(India and Brazil I think). I really doubt it had reached 50 million paying at any point in time.

They could also easily have had different pricing based on location. Requiring EU and US users to pay €5 per year, while have perhaps just €0,25 in Asia, and free in Africa.

If you can't get someone to pay €5/$5 per year for a service they use every single day, then there's something really wrong in how we as users think about the service we use every day.

> If you can't get someone to pay €5/$5 per year for a service they use every single day, then there's something really wrong in how we as users think about the service we use every day.

Which is absolutely the case with most people and recurring payments, even with one time payments. If Signal costed money (even 1-2$), I could not have convinced even 10% of the people I got over to Signal - recurring or one time.

I've used Whatsapp for a few years when they had this pricing model. Use 1 year for free and pay after. I've never paid anything and nobody who I know needed to pay to keep using WhatsApp.

I think it was free on Android but not on iOS. But not completely sure because I only had Android back then

It was a one off payment on iOS but a poorly enforced annual subscription on Android

Much cheaper than what fb makes on ads per user per year, I'm sure

Whatsapp had 700m+ monthly users in early 2015 [1] before they scrapped their subscription fee in early 2016 [2]. Whatsapp was free to use in some jurisdictions for the first year, so we can't assume there was $700m in revenue, but there was certainly enough to pay for 50 engineers you would think.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/whatsapp-passes-700-million-...

[2] https://blog.whatsapp.com/making-whats-app-free-and-more-use...

Whatsapp only had a subscription fee for android users, and I don't know anybody who ever paid for it. They would keep giving you more and more free time; free subscription time would never run out. I imagine it ran out for some users, but I don't know what the criteria was. Perhaps for users in certain countries? Or for users with lots of iphone friends?

On the other hand, iphone users had to pay for the app upfront to download it off the app store.

With 50 employees their "please pay $1/year" model might have actually made enough revenue

Nobody I know paid it even back then. That's why they used it, because it was free.

It's like Microsoft Office these days. If your home license expires they keep threatening you they'll disable it. For years and years.

I paid totally happy with the service they gave me, and I would pay monthly if that would mean having total privacy.

Whatsapp is built on a massive, mature, global system specifically designed for sending messages. It's sad that it needs to exist and even more sad that it has to "make money" for someone. Aren't we already paying for our internet connexion/phone bill? Why do we need to be used by Whatsapp just to utilise it for its most basic purpose?

Because it needs to be built, supported, etc.?

Does it? Dumbphones from 30+ years ago can still send SMS messages just fine with zero software updates. Maybe once a decade or so that could have been enhanced with longer messages, pictures etc. But overall the messaging problem really should have been solved by now.

Yes, it does. SMS aren't encrypted. And messaging is closer to being solved than ever before. If you want to use a "dumbphone" with SMS you can do that.

1) They won't succeed unless they were international from the beginning.

2) A lot of people would be rightly suspicious to use govt systems for their own private data.

Makes me wonder just what FB will do to Whatsapp to keep the money flowing in, as FB's core app/website declines.

Plan A: Ads

Plan B: ummm

And iMessage is compromised bloatware