The party is over. WhatsApp announced that the cloud chat backup that existed until today for free is ending and from now on if you want to back up your chats you will have to use your Google Drive storage package, if you have exceeded your free 15 gigabytes, you will have to pay Google for the storage.
Until today, the storage and backup of chats on WhatsApp was completely free and without affecting the Google Drive account, as part of an agreement signed between WhatsApp and Google in 2018. But now that the agreement has expired, Google has announced that they will not renew the agreement.
In a message from the WhatsApp company, it was stated that "in December 2023, this change will be launched for users of the beta version, and in the first half of 2024, we will launch it for all WhatsApp users on Android. Also, 30 days before the change takes effect, a banner warning of this will be displayed.
If as a result of the change you don't want to back up chats to your Google account when you change devices, you can still transfer the chats between Android devices using the WhatsApp chat transfer feature, how to transfer chat history.