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).
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.
Ok I paid the 1 buck, or agreed to pay a year later. Those days I lived in India, and my friend kinda forced me to use whatsapp by selling it. I still remember sitting in an auto-rickshaw and downloading the app after the sales pitch :) This must have been 2012, but could it be earlier - maybe.
Point being, I agree with you, it was getting that adoption anyways, even with the fees. And within months, I was hearing this from so many others.
How do I remember? I moved back to US in Feb 2013, so it had to be before that, just can not recall the exact year and month.
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.
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.
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).