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Comment by pmlnr | Hacker News Reader

> If whatsapp was still an independent company, they would have to monetize somehow.

No, they wouldn't. This thinking is what has lead the world where it is.

Say you have 2 billion (10^9) users paying $1 per year. You follow inflation. That's 2 billion a year. That covers a lot of workforce, and a lot of servers.

This idea of infinite growth boggles me - how can people with math background insist on such impossible thought?

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Do we have different definitions of monetization? Because to me that's exactly what charging $1 per year sounds like.

Fair point. The problem with the word `monetization` probably comes from recent times, when it sort of became the corporate bs equivalent of squeezing more money out of the same thing by adding ads, selling data, etc.

I'm unable to find the exact quote but soon after the WhatsApp acquisition, when the $1 fee was waived there was a message that went along the lines of "imagine how much more money WhatsApp could make". If someone has it, please send a link.

Good luck having 2 billion people paying you $1 when there are free alternatives.

There are free alternatives for food (soup kitchens), yet people still go to restaurants.

I didn't say people are not willing to pay money to use an app that has free alternatives. I said good luck finding 2 billion such people. Whatsapp today is used by everyone. 8 year old kids and 85 year olds. The network effect. Its biggest asset is the number of users which makes it easy to communicate with everyone you know on it (not everywhere but in many countries). If they charged money it would've been different. It's not about the money. Everyone can afford $1/year. Even kids in poor countries. But not everyone has access to a credit card for example. Many wouldn't bother and use a free alternative like FB messenger or Telegram or whatever.

When you have that many users, their yearly dues is no longer as valuable to the company and its partners, as user data.

Honestly, up until a couple of years ago, WhatsApp wasn't free for iPhone. Yet people still downloaded it and bought it

They didn't pay it. It was mostly just testing on a subset of US users.

I paid, and I wasn’t in the US.

As popular as it is in Europe today, I imagine they may have actually reached a number like that

It was this popular in 2012 already. For Android users first year was free and then you could be charged €0.89/year. I knew paying customers and was willing to do the same. It's a great product at a great price without ads, just take my money. I'd rather pay for a service than be monetized in exchange for using it.

BTW, they had just 50 engineers when FB bought them with 450M users (+1M/day) and they supported more devices back then. Just with those costs and the network effect, keeping the subscription model would have meant a solid source of honest revenue.

10% of that is 200 million.

5% of that is 50 million.

I paid a buck when I got whatsapp, I see my first chat backup from October 2012 :) I did so because my friends were on whatsapp, and I think all of us would have paid a buck a year if that's what the model evolved to.

Unfortunately, the world turned towards 1) freemium, and 2) 'consumer as a product', and it will not be easy to roll back the free chat. But I think it is possible. Make signal survive for 2 years based on donations, or this 1 buck a year/month, and we may be able to have a long term alternative to whatsapp.

$1 a year ? There'll be plenty of takers even in India for this.

I agree. I've been switching messaging apps (first on Windows in the 90s then on phones in the 00s) when a new free one with better features appeared or the previous one asked for money. Then WhatsApp got such a user base to make switching nearly impossible. But if they really enforced the $1 payment everybody would have switched to something else.

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