{"id":20860,"date":"2016-01-18T08:35:34","date_gmt":"2016-01-18T16:35:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/01\/whatsapp-is-now-free-and-promises-to-stay-ad-free"},"modified":"2017-06-04T11:06:46","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T18:06:46","slug":"whatsapp-is-now-free-and-promises-to-stay-ad-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/01\/whatsapp-is-now-free-and-promises-to-stay-ad-free","title":{"rendered":"WhatsApp is now free and promises to stay ad-free"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\\'blog-photo\\' href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/whatsapp-is-now-free-and-promises-to-stay-ad-free.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>WhatsApp is dropping its subscription fees to access the popular messaging service. WhatsApp introduced the fees a few years ago, forcing new users to pay an annual 99 cents subscription after the first year. \u201cAs we\u2019ve grown, we\u2019ve found that this approach hasn\u2019t worked well,\u201d admits WhatsApp in a <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.whatsapp.com\/615\/Making-WhatsApp-free-and-more-useful\">company blog post<\/a> today.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMany WhatsApp users don\u2019t have a debit or credit card number and they worried they\u2019d lose access to their friends and family after their first year. So over the next several weeks, we\u2019ll remove fees from the different versions of our app and WhatsApp will no longer charge you for our service.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019ve been using WhatsApp for the six years it has been available then you\u2019ve probably never experienced the subscription fees. Most original users were granted a free lifetime service, but in recent years the company introduced its subscription to new users. <a href=\"http:\/\/recode.net\/2016\/01\/18\/facebook-owned-whatsapp-to-drop-subscription-fees-for-its-popular-messaging-service\/\">Recode reports<\/a> that if you\u2019ve already paid the 99 cents for the year then there won\u2019t be a refund, but subscription fees will cease immediately.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2016\/1\/18\/10785126\/whatsapp-free-no-subscription-fees\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>WhatsApp is dropping its subscription fees to access the popular messaging service. WhatsApp introduced the fees a few years ago, forcing new users to pay an annual 99 cents subscription after the first year. \u201cAs we\u2019ve grown, we\u2019ve found that this approach hasn\u2019t worked well,\u201d admits WhatsApp in a company blog post today. \u201cMany WhatsApp [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20860"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63223,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20860\/revisions\/63223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}