Facebook-owned messaging platform WhatsApp has finally done away with its $1 annual fee, making the app now completely free to use.

“For many years, we’ve asked some people to pay a fee for using WhatsApp after their first year,” WhatsApp said in a post on its official blog. “As we’ve grown, we’ve found that this approach hasn’t worked well. Many WhatsApp users don’t have a debit or credit card number and they worried they’d lose access to their friends and family after their first year. So over the next several weeks, we’ll remove fees from the different versions of our app and WhatsApp will no longer charge you for our service.”

WhatsApp noted that users may be worried that the elimination of subscription fees could mean that the app will introduce advertising to make up for the drop in revenue, but the company stated that it has no plans to introduce any new ads.

Instead, WhatsApp says that it will be testing “tools that allow you to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organizations that you want to hear from.”

“That could mean communicating with your bank about whether a recent transaction was fraudulent, or with an airline about a delayed flight,” WhatsApp explained. “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.”

That sounds an awful lot like some of the plans Facebook had laid out for its Messenger app for 2016, which includes enabling businesses to “build the right experience in conversations.”

Since Facebook also owns WhatsApp, it is not surprising that the social media giant would want to apply some of the same plans to its other ridiculously popular messaging app.

Image courtesy of WhatsApp Inc