[judge2020]

Discord is likely burning a lot of money on servers & payroll. I would be surprised if they broke even in 2020 given their revenue numbers[0]. Why any VC would back an open source, modifiable project like Matrix just to compete with Discord's existing stranglehold on the market is beyond me.

0: > Discord declined to share how many Nitro subscribers it has, but the Wall Street Journal reported that Discord generated $130 million in revenue last year, up from $45 million in 2019. In the same time period, its monthly user base doubled.

0: https://qz.com/2034087/chat-app-discord-is-shedding-its-game...

[Dylan16807]

With somewhere in the thousand plus range of employees they'd have to be spending a hundred million on servers. I'd sure hope costs aren't that high. I'm pretty sure I could host every discord server I'm on for the price of a nitro subscription.

Edit: I mean, imgur has an estimated revenue of twelve million. Staple a hundred IRC servers on the side and you have most of discord's functionality accounted for. Unless the voice calls are really tough, and they're actually a streaming company by majority of expenses, where would the costs come from?