Making WhatsApp free and even more useful

Today, nearly one billion people around the world rely on WhatsApp to communicate with family and friends. From a new father sharing photos of his newborn baby with his family in Indonesia, to a student in Spain asking how his friends are doing, to a doctor trying to communicate with his patients in Brazil, people trust WhatsApp to be fast, simple and reliable.

That's why we're happy to announce that WhatsApp will no longer have a membership fee. For a long time, we have asked many people to pay a membership fee after using WhatsApp for free for the first year. As we grew we found that this approach did not work very well. Many WhatsApp users do not have credit or debit card numbers and were afraid of losing access to family and friends after the first year. Therefore, over the next few weeks we will be removing fees from different versions of our app and you will no longer be charged for the WhatsApp service.

Naturally, everyone can think about how we can continue WhatsApp without a membership fee and whether today's announcement is an indication that we will launch third-party ads. The answer to this is no. Starting this year, we'll be testing some tools that will let you use WhatsApp to stay in touch with the businesses and organizations you want. This could be to confirm with your bank whether your most recent transaction was fraudulent or to inquire from your airline if your flight has been delayed. Today, we can all receive these types of messages - via SMS message and phone call - from different places. That's why we want to try different tools that can make this easier via WhatsApp, without third-party ads and spam messages.

We hope you will be pleased with this innovation coming to WhatsApp. We'd love to hear any feedback you have.