Good news, WhatsApp has backtracked on its decision to charge for the use of the service, now earlier today the company has announced that to make the app more accessible to people and for people not to lose their messages and to do that it needs to be a totally free service, in the past it has been free for one year then $0.99/69p a year there after. The co-founder of WhatsApp said at the DLD conference that the company is dropping the charge now for good moving forward.

“Many WhatsApp users don’t have a debit or credit card number and they worried they’d lose access to their friends and family after their first year. So over the next several weeks, we’ll remove fees from the different versions of our app and WhatsApp will no longer charge you for our service.”

This is a good choice from the users perspective, but that charge of 69p isn’t really that much a year but to be fair a lot of users don’t have access to card details, but if everyone paid a year the company would make around $1 billion a year which is good going, but has Facebook owns the company, it can be supported that way which doesn’t really make that much sense business wise as ads wont be used either.

WhatsApp now has around 900 million users and is owned by Facebook.