WhatsApp is going to go completely free, dropping its annual subscription fee.
The Facebook-owned chat app will instead look to make money by letting companies talk to people in messages.
Jan Koum, WhatsApp's co-founder, said that the subscription fee "really doesn't work that well" and that people were worried that they might miss a payment because they can't get to a credit card, losing their access.
The company stressed that it won't make up the lost money through ads, instead using the app as a way of letting people talk to businesses or organisations — who will presumably pay for the privilege.
"That could mean communicating with your bank about whether a recent transaction was fraudulent, or with an airline about a delayed flight," the company wrote in a blog post. "We all get these messages elsewhere today – through text messages and phone calls – so we want to test new tools to make this easier to do on WhatsApp, while still giving you an experience without third-party ads and spam