[anuragbiyani]

Talk about living in a bubble. +everything drdaeman@ said above.

There are more people using WhatsApp in India (thanks to popularity of image/video/voice-messages) than who can actually read or have usable Bank accounts. If you think they can pay "$1" for something they can get for free (and have been using for free in past), then you are completely out of touch of reality. Apart from the amount (which is not trivial btw), there is no concept of digital payment for masses.

Also I know it's hard for HN crowd to understand, but the concept of paying to protect "Privacy" is completely foreign for majority of the users in the world. I can guarantee you majority of the users (at least in India) will happily let you track them, show targeted ads at them, give you all the personal details you need, heck even give your their Genome for for free without even blinking an eyelid. And I am not saying this is just because of ignorance on their part, but rather "Who cares if they track me" - I get free services in return.

And this is actually not a bad setup really (again I know HN crowd will get their pitchforks out at it): Show Ads to provide actual free services (like WhatsApp, Google search, Maps, etc) to the masses. It's much better IMO then charging for these services and never have the masses be able to use them (like "GPS" would be a premium service for rich people).

Disclaimer: All opinions expressed are mine and only mine and have no connection to my employer (Google).

[pnloyd]

So what's a dollar to an average Indian whatsapp user. An hour's wage, a day, week?

[randomEntity22]

The average wage for most kind of hard labour is around ₹200/hour or ₹600/day in cities, which will be around $3/hour or $10/day. I believe the bigger issue is the payment system rather than money, most Indians don't use digital payments

[kamaal]

Nothing. For poor it might make them think for a few seconds, but its still nothing.

The real issue is they can't compete with $0.

Also best way WhatsApp can work around this is to just ship their app with the phone, and bill the phone $1 * avg life of the phone.