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