No, before Whatsapp, people were mostly using Facebook messages, at least where I lived at the time.

And no one was paying per SMS at the time we were using SMS for communication, almost everyone I know were on monthly plans that gave you N text messages and N minutes of calls for static sum each month.

The first people I saw who started using whatsapp, was people who were communicating across the border, because even if you had a monthly plan, those didn't include international messages. Eventually we all converged on whatsapp because that's what outside family and relatives used anyways.