WeChat plans to launch a paid cloud storage service for chat records, with a minimum price of 130 yuan per year?

Just when everyone had gotten used to using WeChat for free, news came that WeChat would start charging a fee.

According to China Daily, an insider said that WeChat will launch a paid cloud storage service and adopt an annual payment model: Apple users will pay about 180 yuan per year, and Android users will pay about 130 yuan per year.

The rumored WeChat paid service is a cloud storage service, which is more commonly known as the WeChat chat history cloud backup function. In response, an insider said that the project is still in the final stages of promotion and the specific details have not yet been finalized. As soon as the news came out, the topic #WeChat plans to launch a paid cloud storage service for chat history# quickly became a hot search.

WeChat chat records have been a problem for a long time. WeChat is a social circle for people to communicate with each other, and it contains important chat records. However, WeChat does not save the chat records of users. Once the phone is lost or replaced, all previous WeChat records will be lost.

In order to solve this problem, WeChat also provides two chat history backup and migration methods, namely backing up chat history to a computer and migrating chat history to another device. Both modes are troublesome to operate and are only suitable for backing up chat history in advance. Once the phone is lost or deleted by mistake, the chat history will be lost, which will cause the embarrassing situation of permanent loss.

In comparison, QQ is more user-friendly in this regard. In terms of the mode of managing chat records, QQ can achieve cloud roaming between different devices, and the chat records of SVIP users can roam for up to two years.

The basic model of WeChat's chat history paid cloud storage service is similar to the QQ chat history roaming function. After paying, users can back up their chat history in the cloud and directly download it remotely when needed.

Many people are still looking forward to the function of backing up WeChat chat records in the cloud. After all, it records every precious moment in their lives.

However, like any other free application software, WeChat will have two different voices once the issue of charging is involved.

Some people think that WeChat has more and more functions and backing up chat records in the cloud will consume a lot of server space, so it is understandable that WeChat charges a certain amount of money. Others think that although WeChat is free to use, WeChat has made a lot of money through its ecosystem of over 1.2 billion active users, and WeChat users have become one of Tencent's important money-making tools, so these new functions should not be charged.

Indeed, there are reasons for charging, and there are reasons for not charging. It all depends on what model WeChat officials will ultimately adopt.

In fact, compared to the cloud backup of WeChat chat history, many people expect WeChat to remove the fancy functions and design it more simply. After all, after 10 years of upgrades and iterations, WeChat now has more and more functions, but the size is also getting more and more bloated, and has become a big consumer of storage in mobile phones. More realistically, these so-called rich functions of WeChat are not available to everyone, and some functions are even unknown to most users.

Looking back, one of the important reasons why WeChat was able to overtake QQ and develop rapidly was its simplicity. Today, QQ is becoming increasingly obsolete while WeChat is becoming increasingly bloated, and it looks like the next QQ.

WeChat launched a chat history cloud storage service and started a paid model. Naturally, the WeChat official team had its own considerations, but whether users will buy into it is another topic.