[SaltyBackendGuy]

> It works nice and is free, but for how long?

I wonder about this a lot. I wonder if they have some big 'whales' that help sustain their business OR they're just selling all of our data (is that enough to make money at discords scale??).

[grlass]

one of the founders and current CEO Jason Citron had a previous org called OpenFeint, which:

> was party to a class action suit with allegations including computer fraud, invasion of privacy, breach of contract, bad faith and seven other statutory violations. According to a news report "OpenFeint's business plan included accessing and disclosing personal information without authorization to mobile-device application developers, advertising networks and web-analytic vendors that market mobile applications" [1]

Of course that doesn't mean anything about the current model of Discord, but good to be aware of.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFeint#History

[bonesinger]

IMO its a good competitor to slack. They probably make money from businesses too. They have lots of options for permissions/roles and all kinds of API access to write bots for.

[judge2020]

Unless businesses are paying for server boosts[0] (which would only be useful for 1080p60 screen-share or a 50mb upload limit), there's no way to use Discord for business or pay extra for business use outside of creating a free server like any other; there's no real reason to choose Discord for business either, since it has no real retention policy (other than storing messages forever, for now), DLP is non-existent, there's no SSO/SAML, etc. The only reason to use Discord for business is if you really like Discord and/or other parts of your business are on Discord, like if you run a video game.

0: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028038352-S...

[derefr]

There are "businesses" that have communities, and want to own/manage them. Discord works much better than Slack as a platform for "official" managed open-membership communities; it's seemingly a use-case the Discord staff have put a lot of thought into.

Think: every content-creator or streamer.

But also: regular corporations that provide platform services that people build their own stuff on top of, such that people want to talk to each-other about the service rather than just talking to the corporation about the service. (The sort of thing you used to stand up a hosted forum for.)

[bonesinger]

Yep, I agree about limited industry but it does work in that respect. I see it used a lot for content creators as a way to organize and tier out their fans as well.

[grlass]

I have some contacts who work for organisations use it instead of Slack for SMEs of 100-1000 employees.

Unsure what their billing looks like, but it works pretty well for them apparently.

[yawnxyz]

we're trying to use Discord for our multi-site grant-funded healthcare project... it's pretty messy to use. Would love to pay for some decent support... People are getting locked out of their accounts for some reason and working with their support team is very painful.

[ezconnect]

It's a spy and data mining operation for some intelligence group same reason why twitter and facebook got traction.