Meta Is Testing a Paid WhatsApp Tier for People Who Want a Nicer Looking App
A subscription called WhatsApp Plus would add extra chat pins and exclusive themes for a small monthly fee.
Meta is tiptoeing toward something it once swore it would never do: asking regular WhatsApp users to pay for the app.
The company is testing a subscription called WhatsApp Plus in a few markets. For a modest fee somewhere between one and three dollars a month, you get a slightly fancier version of the messaging service. It is not a radical overhaul. Messages and calls stay free. The paid perks are the kind of things that sound nice but are hardly essential.
The standout feature is the ability to pin up to twenty chats at the top of your list. Right now everyone is limited to three. If you are the sort of person whose WhatsApp screen is a frantic scroll of work groups, school committees, and family threads, that extra pin space might actually be useful.
The rest of the package is about looks. Subscribers get exclusive sticker packs, new chat themes, custom alert sounds, and a few different app icons to choose from. There is also a small quality of life improvement that lets you change notification settings for several chats at once instead of opening each one individually.
The pricing is not final, but early beta screenshots suggest it will be cheap. In Pakistan testers see a price around eighty cents. In Europe it is closer to two and a half euros. A free trial will likely be part of the rollout.
This is a quiet pivot for Meta. When it bought WhatsApp in 2014 for nineteen billion dollars, the app was earning money from a yearly one dollar fee. Meta killed that charge in 2016 and promised the app would be free forever. Since then it has made money from WhatsApp by selling business messaging tools and click to chat ads. That has worked fine. But now the company is building expensive artificial intelligence projects and wants new subscription revenue to balance things out.
It helps that the world has changed since 2016. People are used to paying for Telegram Premium or Snapchat Plus. A small monthly charge for a nicer looking app no longer seems strange.
WhatsApp Plus is not a big gamble. It is a low pressure test to see if anyone will pay a couple of dollars for a few extra pins and prettier colors. If nobody bites, the free version hums along unchanged.
Subscribe to my whatsapp channel
