WhatsApp Begins Limited Roll-Out of ‘Plus’ Paid Tier Offering 18 Themes, 20 Pinned Chats

Meta is retracing ground it abandoned when WhatsApp scrapped its US$0.99 annual fee in January 2016, echoing the micro-monetisation turn that Twitter pursued with ‘Blue’ in 2022 and Snapchat with ‘+’ in 2023. The move fits a decade-long drift away from an ad-only revenue model toward layered subscriptions across social platforms, as companies probe what portion of their three-billion-user network will pay for vanity or organisational add-ons. In the longer arc of communication history—from Bell’s per-minute voice tariffs in the 1920s to AOL’s flat-rate plans in the 1990s—the question has always been where the paywall sits: access, content, or customisation. WhatsApp’s test suggests Meta is gambling that aesthetic personalisation, not core connectivity, is where it can extract incremental revenue without fracturing the network effect. Whether users accept even this light monetisation will signal how the next century of ubiquitous, encrypted messaging might be financed—through data-driven ads alone or a mosaic of micro-subscriptions.