WhatsApp founder and CEO Jan Koum revealed that the messaging platform is planning to drop the annual subscription fees for the service, reports Re/Code. WhatsApp is initially free for the first year and charges an annual fee of Rs 53 for Indian users and about 99 cents globally. The report added that WhatsApp will stop charging customers immediately but it will take some time to remove the payment infrastructure from the app. In September 2015, WhatsApp said that it has 900 million monthly active users with India as its largest market. In November 2014, the company said India accounted for 70 million of its active users, which was over a one-tenth of its global users back then. WhatsApp also mentioned that it would not be running third-party ads on its platform on its blog. The company said that it will test new models for revenue that will allow users to communicate with businesses and organizations they want. Naturally, people might wonder how we plan to keep WhatsApp running without subscription fees and if today's announcement means we're introducing third-party ads. The answer is no. Starting this year, we will test tools that allow you to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organizations that you wantto hear from. That could mean communicating with your bank about whether a recent transaction was fraudulent, or with an airline about a delayed flight. We all get these messages elsewhere today – through text messages and phone calls – so we want to test new tools to…
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