WhatsApp happened at a time when, in Europe, you paid for SMS.
WhatsApp allowed people to send SMS without paying, or rather, paying just once to buy the app, so it was instantly valuable if you just convinced your spouse or parents or a single friend to install it.
To overcome it now, you need a lot more effort (or rely on enshittification, which I'm sure will happen).
WhatsApp launched in January of 2009 compared with Facebook Chat which launched in 2008. WhatsApp saw drastically wider adoption among the general populace and paying for “N text messages per month” is precisely what people refer to as paying per message - WhatsApp had unlimited messaging.
Is "Facebook Chat" not the same as "Facebook Messenger", the separate chat client? Because I seem to remember a lot of people using the chat built-in into Facebook (not Messenger) a lot earlier than the standalone app/client, maybe I misrecall.
> paying for “N text messages per month” is precisely what people refer to as paying per message
Maybe I said it wrong, "N text messages per month" for me means "Pay us 10 EUR per month, send up to 5000 messages" for example. Doesn't matter how many you send, you pay the same.
While "pay per message" is "Every text message you send, costs 0.01 EUR". Maybe I'm using the wrong words, but that's how I understand it.
Most of the people who were "texters" (in my circles) were on plans offering the first way of paying, while hardly anyone was doing it the second.
Another important part, was that most telecom's had free SMS and calls if you were with the same company (and still do, AFAIK), so constant bickering about what plan people are on and why they don't change so it's free and yadda yadda.
Many people were already mostly texting for free at this point.
Facebook chat preceded Messenger which was a rebranding and separating into a standalone app precisely because WhatsApp ate their lunch so bad.
The rates people were paying back then were extortionate - like 60-90% profit margin. When WhatsApp launched, plans were 5-15 euros/month for 100-500 messages with ~0.15 per message for overages. So you might not count the bundle as a per text message, but it really is which you can tell by what happens if you send more than your bundle allowed. Compare that with WhatsApp’s $1/year for unlimited messaging and you start to see the pricing disparity.
Many people were not mostly texting free in 2009. I think you’ve got the timelines mixed up. That started changing towards the mid to late 2010s precisely because of internet-based chat apps on the phone and plummeting data costs making the telco’s SMS pricing plans insane.
No, before Whatsapp, people were mostly using Facebook messages, at least where I lived at the time.
And no one was paying per SMS at the time we were using SMS for communication, almost everyone I know were on monthly plans that gave you N text messages and N minutes of calls for static sum each month.
The first people I saw who started using whatsapp, was people who were communicating across the border, because even if you had a monthly plan, those didn't include international messages. Eventually we all converged on whatsapp because that's what outside family and relatives used anyways.