How Does WhatsApp Make Money If Almost Nobody Pays to Use It?

You've probably opened WhatsApp today. More than three billion people use it every month. WhatsApp doesn't charge you to download it, to send a message, or to call someone on the other side of the world. There's no subscription, and there are no ads in your chats. And yet, in twenty fourteen, Facebook agreed to pay about nineteen billion dollars for it. By the time the deal closed, rising Facebook shares had pushed its value to nearly twenty-two billion. The year before, WhatsApp's entire revenue had been about ten million dollars. So for years, one of the biggest questions in tech was a simple one: how do you make money from an app that almost nobody pays for? Today, Meta has an answer, and it's growing fast. It just isn't coming from the people sending the messages. It's coming from the businesses on the other side of the chat, from ads on other apps that send you into WhatsApp, and, since twenty twenty-five, from ads in one corner of the app itself. So how does WhatsApp actually make money? Who's really paying for it? And what happened to the promise it was built on? Let's follow the money.

WhatsApp started in twenty oh nine. Its founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, had met while working at Yahoo. That same year, Acton had applied for jobs at Twitter and at Facebook, and been turned down by both. The app they built did one simple thing: it let people send messages over the internet instead of paying for text messages, which in many countries were still expensive. For a while, WhatsApp charged a small fee: about a dollar a year, after a free first year. That was the business model. No ads. According to a partner at Sequoia, the venture firm that invested in the company, Koum kept a note from Acton on his desk that read: No ads, no games, no gimmicks. It worked. By early twenty fourteen, more than four hundred fifty million people were using WhatsApp every month, and about seventy percent of them were active on any given day. Then Facebook made its offer: four billion dollars in cash, about twelve billion in Facebook stock, and another three billion in restricted stock for the founders and employees. That's more than forty dollars for every monthly user. And it was for a company whose revenue in twenty thirteen was about ten point two million dollars, with a net loss of about one hundred thirty-eight million, mostly from stock-based compensation.

Why would anyone pay that much? Facebook wasn't buying revenue. It was buying people, and the habit of opening an app many times a day. For a while, WhatsApp barely changed. In January twenty sixteen, it dropped its one-dollar fee entirely. At the time, it had about nine hundred million users, and it said it would not start rolling out third-party ads to replace that money. Instead, it said it would test ways for people to hear from businesses: a bank flagging a suspicious transaction, or an airline warning about a delay. That same year, WhatsApp updated its privacy policy to share some account information with Facebook. In twenty seventeen, the European Commission fined Facebook one hundred ten million euros for giving misleading information during its review of the deal, about whether the two companies' user accounts could be matched. And inside the company, the founders were losing the argument. Brian Acton left in twenty seventeen, leaving behind about eight hundred fifty million dollars in stock that hadn't yet vested. Jan Koum left the following year. Acton later told Forbes he had objected to plans to target ads and sell analytics tools to businesses. In his words: 'I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit.'

So where does the money come from now? Start with businesses. In twenty eighteen, WhatsApp launched a separate Business app for small shops, and then a platform that larger companies can plug into their own systems. The app is free. The platform is where Meta charges. Since July twenty twenty-five, businesses on that platform pay per message, mostly for the pre-approved template messages they send to customers. There are three main kinds. Marketing messages, like a sale or a new product. Utility messages, like an order update or a delivery notice. And authentication messages: the one-time codes you get when you log in. The price depends on the type of message, and on the country of the person receiving it. On Meta's current rate card, a single marketing message to someone in India costs a business a little over one cent. In the United States, about two and a half cents. In Brazil and the United Kingdom, around six cents. In Germany, more than thirteen cents. Utility and login messages are much cheaper. In the U.S., they cost about a third of a cent. Those numbers look tiny. But a large bank, airline or retailer can send millions of messages a month, and there are businesses like that in almost every country on earth. A marketing campaign of one million messages in Brazil comes to more than sixty thousand dollars.

But one of the biggest parts of WhatsApp's business may not show up as WhatsApp revenue at all. You've probably seen this: an ad on Facebook or Instagram, and instead of a link to a website, the button says Send Message. Tap it, and you're in a WhatsApp chat with the business. Meta calls these click-to-message ads. The business pays for the ad, and that money counts as advertising revenue, not as a WhatsApp fee. To make the deal sweeter, Meta doesn't charge for WhatsApp messages for seventy-two hours after a business replies to a customer who came in through one of these ads. Back in twenty twenty-two, Mark Zuckerberg said click-to-WhatsApp ads had passed a one-point-five-billion-dollar annual run rate. In twenty twenty-three, he said click-to-message ads across Meta's apps, including Messenger and Instagram, had reached a ten-billion-dollar annual run rate. That's not all WhatsApp. But the idea is the same: WhatsApp is the place where the conversation, and often the sale, happens. And it's still growing. At the start of twenty twenty-six, Meta said U.S. revenue from click-to-message ads had grown more than fifty percent in a year. In other words, a lot of what WhatsApp is worth to Meta gets counted somewhere else.

Then, in June twenty twenty-five, came the change WhatsApp had once said it wouldn't make. It started showing ads. Not in your chats. Meta says the ads, along with two other new features, appear only in the Updates tab, where people watch Status posts and follow channels. According to Meta, that tab is used by about one and a half billion people every day. The three features are ads in Status, between the updates your contacts post; promoted channels, where businesses and creators pay to be discovered; and channel subscriptions, where you can pay a monthly fee to a channel you follow for exclusive updates. Meta says it targets those ads using limited information, like your country or city, your language, the channels you follow and how you interact with ads, and that personal messages, calls and groups aren't used. It also says it will never sell or share your phone number with advertisers. The rollout has been slow on purpose. This January, Meta said it would keep ad levels low for now while it improved the format. By April, it said hundreds of millions of people were viewing Status ads every day. One Wall Street analyst, Mark Mahaney of Evercore ISI, has estimated that these features could bring in around ten billion dollars a year by twenty twenty-eight. That's a projection, not a result. But it shows how much money a single tab could be worth.

So how much money is this, really? Meta doesn't report WhatsApp's revenue on its own. The closest number is a line in its earnings called Family of Apps other revenue, and Meta says its growth comes mainly from WhatsApp paid messaging, along with subscriptions like Meta Verified. In the second quarter of twenty twenty-six, that line crossed one billion dollars for the first time, up seventy-three percent from a year earlier. In the third quarter, it reached about one point one billion, up fifty-nine percent. And Meta said paid messaging on WhatsApp alone had crossed a two-billion-dollar annual run rate by the end of twenty twenty-five. That's real money. But compare it with the rest of Meta. In the third quarter, Meta made about sixty-three billion dollars from advertising. The other revenue line was less than two percent of the company's total. And at a two-billion-dollar run rate, spread across more than three billion users, paid messaging works out to well under a dollar per user per year. That's why Meta keeps adding new ways to earn. This year, it made AI business agents available around the world on WhatsApp and Messenger. In July, Zuckerberg said more than a million businesses were using them every week. He has said they could eventually be paid for through subscriptions, by volume, or only when they deliver results.

WhatsApp's model isn't the only way to pay for a messaging app, and around the world, you can see very different choices. In China, Tencent's Weixin, known internationally as WeChat, has more than one point four billion monthly users. It isn't just for chatting. People pay for things inside it, book services and use mini programs: small apps that run inside the app. Tencent says those mini programs handled about eight trillion yuan in transactions in twenty twenty-four. The chat is the doorway. The money is in everything you do once you're inside. Telegram took another route: a paid tier. Its founder, Pavel Durov, said that in twenty twenty-four, Telegram made a profit for the first time, with revenue over one billion dollars and about twelve million paying Premium subscribers. Signal went the other way entirely. It's run by a nonprofit foundation, launched in twenty eighteen with fifty million dollars from, of all people, Brian Acton, WhatsApp's co-founder. Signal has said it expected to need about fifty million dollars a year to run by twenty twenty-five, and it relies on donations. And WhatsApp has struggled to copy WeChat. In India, where it has hundreds of millions of users, WhatsApp Pay arrived in a payments market already dominated by Google Pay and PhonePe, and it has stayed small. Same idea, a chat app. Four very different answers to the question of who pays.

So who really pays for WhatsApp? Not the people chatting with their families. At least, not in cash. The money comes from three places. First, businesses, which pay Meta a few cents at a time to reach customers who'd rather get an order update in a chat than in their inbox. Like any business cost, some of that can end up in the prices those businesses charge. Second, advertisers on Facebook and Instagram, who pay to start conversations that happen on WhatsApp. And third, more and more, your attention, in the Updates tab, where the ads now live. For most users, the trade still looks good: a free app that works across most of the world, on almost any phone. Meta says personal messages and calls stay end-to-end encrypted. And if you only use WhatsApp to chat, the ads stay out of your way. But the history is worth remembering. The founders promised no ads, sold the company, and eventually left after clashing with Facebook over data and advertising. In twenty sixteen, WhatsApp said it would not roll out third-party ads. In twenty twenty-five, it did. A free app is rarely just free. It's a question of who pays, and how long the deal stays the same.

Next time on Margin, we follow the money into a bill almost every driver in America has to pay — and why it jumped so fast, even for people who never filed a claim. If you want to understand how money actually moves before the headlines catch up, subscribe, and follow the money.