Everyone knows by now. After the first year in which you can use the free service, you must renew your WhatsApp subscription by paying a sum that can be € 0,89 for one year of subscription, € 2,40 for three years or € 3,34 for five years. Making the payment is very simple, just go to the app settings and press a button. However there are many people who, for one reason or another, do not want to shell out this money or are temporarily unable to do so and write to me asking how to renew WhatsApp for free.
If you are also part of these ... well, know that you can't! If you are unable to use your credit card (or PayPal account) you may want to ask a friend or relative to pay for the subscription on your behalf. Alternatively, you could also close your account and create a new one, but it is such a long and counterproductive procedure that, in practical terms, it costs well over the 89 cents needed to renew WhatsApp for a year.
UPDATE: the procedure to renew WhatsApp no longer requires any type of payment. The service went free in early 2016, so you no longer need to pay or renew your subscription.
The subscription to WhatsApp can be paid in various ways: with the credit card associated with your smartphone (the one you use to buy apps on Google Play, App Store, etc., just to be clear); with an account PayPal or with the telephone credit.
If you are in an emergency situation where you need to renew WhatsApp urgently and you cannot pay with any of these three methods, you can ask a friend or relative to pay for the subscription on your behalf. It is a perfectly legal solution and officially supported by the service.
You can request the renewal of your WhatsApp subscription to another user simply by sending them the payment link via email. To do this, start WhatsApp on your mobile, go to Settings of the app (on Android just press on three dots at the top right and select the item Settings from the menu that appears) and select the items Account> Payment Info from the screen that opens.
Next, put the check mark next to the type of subscription you want to subscribe (1 year, 3 years o 5 years), presses the button Send payment link and send the email with the WhatsApp payment link to the person who will have to make the payment for you. Please note that this procedure involves using PayPal as the only possible payment method.
If there is a problem with PayPal, you can tell the person who agreed to get you renew WhatsApp for free to go to the section Settings> Contacts> Pay for a friend of his WhatsApp, press the button Choose a contact and select your name to give yourself the subscription using your credit card or phone credit. But be careful, at the moment this feature is only supported by the Android version of WhatsApp.
Earlier I also mentioned a method to avoid paying for WhatsApp by deleting your account. The procedure, as I told you, is very complex, has various contraindications (first of all the cancellation of all chats) and does not always ensure 100% success: it is absolutely not worth completing it to avoid spending just 89 cents. . Anyway, for informational purposes only, I will now illustrate it to you in more detail.
The first step is to delete your WhatsApp account by going to the menu Settings> Accounts application by selecting the item Delete account and typing your mobile number in the screen that opens. Then you have to delete WhatsApp from your smartphone, install it on a phone on which it has never been used and perform the registration procedure with your mobile number (that of the smartphone on which you want to renew the subscription for free).
Once you have received the verification code (on your smartphone) and typed it (in the new phone on which WhatsApp has been installed), you must also delete the account and application from the new terminal and reinstall WhatsApp on your phone. If everything works properly, you can take advantage of another year of free service, however it often happens that the system notices the "trick" and within a few days the request for renewal of the paid subscription reappears.
As for the conversations, to avoid the deletion of the chats it would be necessary to make a prior backup and then a restore as explained in my guide on how to reinstall WhatsApp.
For completeness of information, I would like to point out that there are also users officially authorized to use Free WhatsApp for life. These are those who downloaded the application on the iPhone a few years ago, when it was paid (it cost € 0,89 one-off).
To date, those who use the SIM used at the time to buy WhatsApp on iPhone have a lifetime license that can be exploited regardless of the smartphone and telephone operator used.
