WhatsApp became free (almost)

At that time, as the hotter the battle erupted as US and Asian markets between bursts of instant messengers like Line, Viber, KakaoTalk, WeChat, Path, and even Facebook Messenger, application developers, old-timer WhatsApp slowly rolled out a major update.

WhatsApp dominates in Europe and often before becoming a hero of rumors that it was about to buy a billion Google is the Facebook. today's update shoots applications with a price tag of $ 1, and translates it into a model freemium. Now the app is available for free, and after the first year will be a charge of $ 1 per year. This is not news in itself - CEO Jam Koum company has already announced about the plans a few months ago. A similar model already in place on other platforms, Android, BlackBerry, Nokia and Windows Phone.

The business model of payment for the app - vestige of the old era, when the developer was selling its product on rules similar to the usual fzicheskim goods. However, over time many paid applications switched to model freemium (free basic version of the pay-per-dpolnitelnye function). This is especially noticeable in the games market, but also other kinds of applications, for example, the same messenger, actively move to freemium.

For example, Japanese Line, gathered in only one of Japan of $ 58.9 million in the first quarter of this year. on sale app purchases and stickers - that other applications Path and Facebook Messenger soon copied.

WhatsApp was launched in 2009 and quickly gained popularity in the high prices on the SMS service markets. The company recently announcedThat its user base exceeds the number of Twitter, the number of active users is 250 million per month, the service handles up to 17 billion messages per day.