At the business model level, although gb whatsapp is introduced as free to use, it makes money on advertisement injection and selling out users’ data. Based on statistics reported by third-party advertisement tracking tool AdGuard in 2023, the in-app third-party SDK sends 12.7 advertisement requests per hour, and users actively watch video ads on average 4.3 times a day. Each click generates $0.02 of developer revenue. Its annual advertisement revenue is estimated to be 24 million US dollars (estimated on the basis of 210 million active users worldwide). Technical analysis shows that its “free” service does generate revenue by selling information regarding user behavior (e.g., keyword frequency from chats and location access logs), with each user profile costing $0.003. Estimated on a daily generation basis of 37 million data points, yearly profit is more than $4 million.
As far as implicit costs are concerned, gb whatsapp privacy leakage risk can be estimated to result in average yearly loss per user of $18.6 (estimated based on average cost of data recovery service in 2022). A research conducted by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky states that its unofficial encryption method increases the chance of leakage of information to as much as 0.9 times per user annually (0.03 times for official WhatsApp), and the mean cost of remediation of identity theft after one leakage is $127. One such widespread example is a massive data breach attack in Brazil in 2023. 94,000 users were targeted with SIM card cloning due to using gb whatsapp. A cost of $17 per customer was incurred on average for phone bill retrieval and 9.3 hours for handling complaints.
Legislative compliance costs suggest that if EU business customers use gb whatsapp to process customer inquiries, they might face a fine up to 4% of their annual turnover for violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). (The official business version of WhatsApp Business API costs just $0.01 per message in compliance.) In the Meta case against a third party in 2023 for a tweaked version of the app, the court directed the gb whatsapp developers to pay $2.3 million in copyright damages. This cost was passed on to customers indirectly, since the frequency of forced upgrade pop-ups within the app increased to every 48 hours (the official app has no such pop-up).
Market alternative data suggests that although gb whatsapp, without any direct paid subscription, its “free” price significantly exceeds the cost of the official one: Users are confronted with an average of 37 pop-up Windows with restriction of functions annually (e.g., “Unlocking advanced themes requires sharing to 5 groups”). With the rate of spending 2 minutes on each operation and an hourly salary of $15, the hidden cost of time is $18.5 annually. On the other hand, the annual subscription of the official WhatsApp Business costs $299 per enterprise account but comes with a 99.9% delivery rate guarantee of messages. Though gb whatsapp has an undelivered message rate of 6.7% (officially 0.3%), that is equivalent to an average annual loss of around $420 in order amount for small e-commerce users.
Long-term cost-of-use analysis indicates that gb whatsapp’s “free” sustainability is questionable: In 2023, its creators reduced the nodes by 35% due to pressure from the expense of servers (a mean estimated monthly cost of $280,000), and message transmission time increased from 0.8 seconds to 2.4 seconds. As far as device performance degradation is concerned, repeated use of this application has doubled the rate of battery life degradation of mid-range mobile phones to 11% per year (the official app is only 4%). Assuming a device replacement cycle of 2 years, the hidden hardware cost to consumers has increased by approximately 60 US dollars. Besides, its rate of account banning is up to 4.3% every month (0.07% for the official version). It takes 1.7 hours each time and one has to buy a virtual number (costing an average of 3.5 US dollars per number) to regain it. It costs more than six times that of the official service.