Facebook-owned mobile messaging app WhatsApp hit a new milestone this week.

According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the app has now accumulated 1 billion active monthly users. The news comes just five months after the service announced it had reached 900 million users and almost a year to the day after the company said it hit half a billion users in January 2015.

By comparison, Facebook’s own messenger app only has 800 million active monthly users.

In a Monday Facebook post, Zuckerberg said the WhatsApp’s community has more than doubled since the service was acquired by Facebook for $21.8 billion in late 2014. According to WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum, 42 billion messages, 1.6 billion photos and 250 million videos are shared each day on the service. The application also supports 53 languages spoken by its users.

But Zuckerberg said the company has more work to do connecting people across the world.

“Next, we’re going to work to connect more people around the world and make it easier to communicate with businesses,” he wrote. “There are only a few services that connect more than a billion people. This milestone is an important step towards connecting the entire world.”

On Monday, WhatsApp also announced that it is moving away from its monthly subscription fee to make the service free. The change, which is scheduled to go into effect across different versions of the app over the next several weeks, will eliminate the 99-cent monthly subscription fee that was required of users after their first year of service.

WhatsApp said it will not replace the subscription fees with third party ads, but will instead make it easier for users to get in touch with businesses and organizations they want to hear from.

Further details about the new business connection service were not immediately available.