To some analysts, this seemed too high of a price to pay for a company that was barely making that much money. In February 2014, WhatsApp was bought by Facebook for $19 Billion. However, that revenue source seemed to keep the lights on for them long enough for them to get more funding. We all know that that subscription fee didn’t work here in Zimbabwe and other markets where WhatsApp is popular. The app then began to grow in popularity and by 2013, the app had already started charging people $0.99 per year in certain countries and had more than 250M active users.Īt this point in time, WhatsApp had been running on the initial investment they got and the $0.99 subscription fee. All of a sudden, you could send more messages to more people regardless of their location for less. Back in the day, SMSes were king of communication until WhatsApp became a chat app. List your products for free A chat app is bornįrom seeing this, the app then evolved to become a chat messaging app. According to an interview with Forbes, the founder Jan Koum says that people then started to use this status feature to send each other funny messages through the notifications feature of iPhones which had been recently made available.
WhatsApp was founded in 2009 and the original idea was just to show a status like “At the gym” next to a contact in your phone’s address. So let’s get to the longer answer of why it is where it is at. The problem with the short answer is it leaves you wondering how has it been surviving as a business. So how does WhatsApp make money if it is free? The short answer is it is not making that much money currently if any at all. Sometimes I don’t even realize that there’s a business behind this app that I’ve come to know and love. The short answer to the questionįor many of us in Zimbabwe, WhatsApp has become our go to app for communication. So if you’re like me and are not quite sure what the answer is, let’s take a look. To my surprise, I didn’t have a clear answer to give them and it took me a while to finally understand myself. However, someone recently asked me that same question “If WhatsApp is free, how does it make money?”. It might sound like a question with an obvious answer.
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