Behind the WhatsApp logo found on more than 2 billion smartphones lies one of the tech industry’s biggest what-ifs.

What if the platform’s founders and financiers had rejected Facebook’s $19 billion takeover offer? Would the company have collapsed under the competition with the big tech giants? Or would the $1 annual subscription business model have prevailed over free services that have too many personalized ads anyway?

Many users were worried

Immediately after the announcement of the agreement on February 19, 2014, many users worried that under Facebook the platform would change radically. Shouldn’t the company get the money it spent on the WhatsApp acquisition from somewhere? After all, by the time the acquisition was completed in October 2014 the cost had risen further to $22 billion – a large portion of which was paid in the form of Facebook shares, the value of which also increased.

Ten years later WhatsApp has kept its character intact. There are no ads and the app is not linked to a profile but to the user’s phone number. In addition, all messages are encrypted – in other words visible only to users and not to platform administrators.

A necessary alternative at the right time

When Facebook decided to buy WhatsApp, the latter had around 450 million users. And more classic SMS were sent than chat messages. Today it seems unthinkable to pay any price to be able to send a text message. Back then mobile phone operators were just beginning to come to terms with the idea of ​​losing this rather lucrative source of revenue.

Thus, WhatsApp proved to be the best alternative to SMS at the right time. The platform’s ease of use did not deter new smartphone users and bridged the gap between iPhones and Android-powered mobile phones. iPhones offer the iMessage service, but this requires that both users have an iPhone. So, WhatsApp has given the solution to that too.

The “explosive” growth of WhatsApp

It was 2009 when co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who were working at Yahoo, wanted to start their own start-up business. And that’s how they created WhatsApp. Facebook learned about the service from the VPN app “Onavo,” which it used to track user trends.

The impressive acquisition price could be explained by the “explosive” growth that WhatsApp has experienced. In an antitrust lawsuit, the US government accused Facebook of essentially simply buying a rival company before it became a threat to the same, even proposing to split the service. To this day, the trial is still pending.

$1 annual subscriptions coming?

Now Meta (formerly Facebook) seems to have found a way to monetize WhatsApp. After acquiring the business, Facebook quickly rejected the idea of ​​$1 subscriptions. For users, nothing has changed, but companies pay money to be able to communicate with their customers via WhatsApp. Last quarter Meta’s non-ad revenue grew 82%, largely thanks to WhatsApp’s business platform. However, with the relevant amount reaching only $334 million, this represented 0.8% of the company’s total revenue.

After the acquisition, Koum and Acton remained at WhatsApp for a few years. Koum announced that he would devote some time to activities outside the technology industry, “for example collecting rare air-cooled Porsche cars.” And Acton invested in the Signal app, which also offers chat services – Signal’s encryption technology is also used by WhatsApp today.

Signal is perhaps the tangible proof that the $1 subscription model can be profitable. The platform estimates that it will need about $50 million over the next year to develop and operate it. If it charged just $1 per user WhatsApp could make many times more money.