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If WhatsApp’s co-founder had gotten his way, you’d have had to pay for messages
July 18, 2025
Would you pay to send and receive messages viaWhatsApp? That’s what co-founder Brian Acton proposed toFacebookexecutives, according to a new interview.
Acton, who joined Facebook when it purchased WhatsApp in 2014 (and left last year), revealed the proposal in an interview withForbes. He envisioned users being charged per message after a “certain large number of free messages” was used up.
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“You build it once, it runs everywhere in every country,” Acton was quoted as saying. “You don’t need a sophisticated sales force. It’s a very simple business.”
This wouldn’t be the first time the platform dabbled in payments from users. The platform previously charged a yearly subscription fee, beforedropping the requirementin 2016.
The solution, however, was eventually shot down by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who said the plan “won’t scale,” according to the co-founder. He said his reply was: “No, you don’t mean that it won’t scale. You mean it won’t make as much money […]”
A question of monetization
In the interview, Acton also revealed that Facebook’s push for targeted advertising is one of the key reasons why he left. The co-founder said Facebook wanted to add targeted ads toWhatsApp’s Statusfeature, as opposed to Acton’s idea of letting users pay for messages.
According toForbes, a WhatsApp spokesperson has confirmed that ads are indeed coming to WhatsApp Status next year.
The issue of encryption was another source of tension, according to Acton. Facebook wanted to provide analytics tools to businesses using WhatsApp to chat with clients. The platform’s use of end-to-end encryption meant businesses and Facebook couldn’t read/analyze messages in the first place.
The co-founder said that, while Facebook didn’t want to break the encryption, its managers did question and “probe” ways to offer business-related analytics in an encrypted environment.
“At the end of the day, I sold my company,” he said. “I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day.”
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