Yep I paid for Whatsapp, I've even dug out the receipt email. I want my £0.79 back!

Three years of WhatsApp service for phone just 2,67$... In 2015...

So I think I got that...

Pre acquisition Whatsapp had 450M users. Even accounting for half the revenue of 1$ going away for payment fees (30%) and taxes (20%), that would still have been a nice cushy 200 million $ a year in almost pure profit - WA had 55 (!) employees at acquisition and 550 servers [1].

That's nothing at this scale of users and speaks volumes for the ingenuity of their staff.

The only ones driving even leaner than that are StackOverflow with just nine servers [2].

[1] https://highscalability.com/how-whatsapp-grew-to-nearly-500-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34950843

That fee wasn't really enforced. I was in India at the time and no one paid because no one had credit cards tied to their account. Everyone still used WhatsApp just fine.

Other way round. Facebook bought them in 2014, and they dropped the fee in early 2016.

The fee wasn't enforced in many developing countries, and some users elsewhere will have been jumping through the delete-and-reinstall hoops (which was painful because it lost chat history) to avoid paying.

But with 1bn active users at the time the fee was dropped, it would still have been bringing in more than enough revenue to have sustained Whatsapp as an independent business if they had chosen not to sell to FB.

I was on Android back then and never paid for Whatsapp. Neither did any of my family or friends who used Android phones back in 2012-13