The popular Facebook-owned messaging app, WhatsApp, has recently grown to more than 1 billion monthly active users.

The head of the Facebook-owned company, Jan Koum, posted about the achievement on the popular social network. It should be noted that the news comes just five months after it was revealed that WhatsApp had 900 million monthly active users. To mark the achievement and as part of his social media post, Koum shared that the service has seen 42 billion messages sent daily, 1.6 billion photos shared, 1 billion groups and 250 million videos shared.

This milestone puts WhatsApp as part of the growing number of apps that Facebook owns with such a large reach. Facebook’s core app is already being used by more than 1.5 billion people monthly and it’s likely that Facebook Messenger will be joining the club relatively soon along with the likes of Instagram.

As part of its brief look back, WhatsApp blew up big time hwen Facbeook purchased the messaging app in 2014 for more than $16 billion. At the time, WhatsApp had 450 million monthly active users. This number has more than doubled since than under the leadership and help of Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

Today’s announcement comes just a few days after Facebook’s recent earnings call as well as another announcement stateing that WhatsApp would be dropping its $1 annual subscription fee. As part of removing its fee, WhatsApp decided that it will monetize the service by charging businesses instead. That being said, there are no confirmed plans on how the service will be monetized but speculation is pointing towards the monetization of customer support, which is a plan that was similar to that of Facebook’s Messenger service.

Though the 1 billion active monthly users is an impressive milestone in itself, the other statistics aren’t ones that should be brushed aside. This is especialy the case considering that roughly 1 in 7 people in the world use the app in some capacity. With the $1 annual subscription fee being removed and the service turning to one that is free, it’s likely that WhatsApp may grow even faster. We’ll have to see how the company’s future turns out by being patient.