Contrary to popular belief, having an overseas callcentre run by a third party to answer phones doesn't eliminate the need to have other staff capable of actually making decisions and fixing things.

First tradeoff: training and tooling.

If you go the "minimize the official headcount" approach... now you need to make your software systems and business processs operable by $random users potentially with different first languages, with little context or history with the company. That's gonna require some significant tooling investments compared to the typical 5-person-in-a-basement operation.

Those are massive companies with little competition and millions of global customers so they can have crap-tier support that works most of the time and get away with it.

You're not going to put up with that for Meetup.

partly because oligopolies dont need to provide as good support