[Crosseye_Jack]

They kinda did. Before facebook brought them, the app cost $1/£1 per year (iirc your first year was free). Thing is back then MMS and/or texts across borders was expensive, so if you were regularly sending picture messages to people the $1/£1 sub was a no brainer.

Lets wave a magic wand and presume 50% of the user base thought it was also worth $1 a year and it grew just as well as it did (It was growing very well in the UK before the takeover just by word of mouth). That's still just a messaging app that would be raking in $1.5B per year today, and that's before you bolt on any paid cosmetics or upgrades (small things that users don't mind dropping a few more bucks on).

[parthdesai]

There's no way it would've gotten the adoption it did in 3rd world countries if you had to pay $1 per year.

[calt]

Thing is, it already was getting that adoption, and network effect can largely take care of the rest. Also, some it’s tied to a real phone number, geographic price differentiation is trivial to implement.

[55555]

I think it grew there when you had to pay. It was still cheaper than the alternative.

[nielsole]

And my understanding back then was that enforcement of payment was via the honour system. It was even possible to pay for your contacts, likely to make it as low friction as possible especially as paying for something on the internet was still a relatively new thing.

[jonpurdy]

For $1 per contact, I'd be happy to pay for anyone I know, or ever meet in the future to keep a messaging platform ad-free/user-centric.

[mike_hearn]

> the app cost $1/£1 per year

Not really. They claimed they'd charge this but then kept giving away free time to huge numbers of people because this wasn't an actual business model, they did it just to slow their growth down when they were running out of server capacity. It's discussed in some interview with the founder, iirc.

[pantulis]

I happen to remember paying 1€ for Whatsapp.