I mean it's basically the classic SV way. Build a unsustainable business promising the world. Get traction based on that. Get bought by FAANG. Ride off into sunset & don't look back. Cool guys don't look at explosions/broken promises
On Android, it remained free. That is, even if you didn't pay, it continued to work endlessly.
That said, WhatsApp's plans to make revenue didn't involve showing ads in 2016 (2 years into Facebook acquisition) when they made it officially free:
> 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 want to 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 make this easier to do on WhatsApp, while still giving you an experience without third-party ads and spam.
On Android I still remember getting yearly notifications that my "yearly subscription fee" was waived. So I assume they made it free but also wanted the option to go back to subscriptions if wanted.
What was unsustainable was the will to calmly ignore 19 billion dollars sitting on the table. I would certainly fail that test.
I wonder if they considered a legal structure which would tie their hands, precisely to prevent such a thing. Long before they got so big, I mean. Would that be possible?
I would likely also accept that deal. That's a lot of society's resources you get to direct to solve other problems you care about, and also have plenty left over to, you know, build another open source chat app (once contracts expire—https://www.wired.com/story/signal-foundation-whatsapp-brian...).
There's nothing unsustainable about a tracking-less messaging service. Fundamentally, most Whatsapp usage is sending pictures, small audio clips and text. That doesn't take up a lot of bandwidth (= cheap to run), and should be ever cheaper as server costs drop.
Take a look at what Instagram was spending on infrastructure and bandwidth pre-acquisition. WhatsApp has less images but way higher volume. At that scale it's certainly not cheap to run.
