> monetize it

The owner is a billionaire high-tech enterpreneur partial to the cypherpunk ideas. He is basically doing it out of spite, to piss off the establishment.

Paul was never billinaire. He got ~300M from selling vk.com. Spent ~100M in first year. Spending on telegram's servers only is ~1M/month and telegram is 48+ months old. So he already spent almost half of his money.

I doubt that their operations costs are $1M per month. They should be 1/10th that amount. If you're spending that much, you are being robbed by employees or providers. This number is simply not believable by anyone who has experience running a large datacenter operations organization.

> Spending on telegram's servers only is ~1M/month

Isn't that too much? I mean, setting aside if that's the precise number for Telegram, isn't 1 million a month just for 100M users not impossible?

Yes, we are always wondering how it is possible. But you need to understand that telegram rolled not only their own crypto, but their own DB, PHP compiler and so on. Everything is written in C++.

To solve one of the earliest DDOS attacks telegram's team take their servers put it on the track and install them to other DC. This is insane.

> But you need to understand that telegram rolled not only their own crypto, but their own DB, PHP compiler and so on. Everything is written in C++

All of these sound like once-off items, and don't support/explain why it would cost $1M+ a month

Even if he put that $150 million left in a bank and only earned 1% interest it would still be $1.5 million a year, so I doubt it's much of a problem.

The founders aim to keep it free forever, should they want to earn money they'll add some non critical features so people who want to pay will keep the app running

How do you think of its business model? Keep it free to get a big user base then sell it to huge enterprise? Like Whatsapp and Facebook?

I guess they have several more years to introduce something. About the business model and monetization, the Telegram FAQ [1] has long stated this:

>Q: How are you going to make money out of this? > We believe in fast and secure messaging that is also 100% free.

> Pavel Durov, who shares our vision, supplied Telegram with a generous donation through his Digital Fortress fund, so we have quite enough money for the time being. If Telegram runs out, we'll invite our users to donate and add non-essential paid options to break even. But making profits will never be a goal for Telegram.

[1]: https://telegram.org/faq#q-how-are-you-going-to-make-money-o...

Line sells stickers . that's a very effective strategy

Well, they do not aim to earn money out of Telegram, so I guess that'll just work fine if they sell some stickers or things like that. The thing about Whatsapp and others is that they are a profit minded company, Telegram isn't, they just need money to keep it running