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A comment on WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers. Parent comment

Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by grardb on Monday October 25, 2021 @04:17AM (#28985553)
Technically, but GP is allocating over 95% of post-tax revenue to everything other than engineer salaries, which is probably extremely generous.

WhatsApp had 200M users in February 2013[1], which was a year before they were acquired by Facebook. Perhaps they wouldn't have gotten to 1B users without Facebook, but I'm sure they still would've grown in the last ~8 years, and fewer users likely results in lower costs. My guess is they would still be doing very well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp

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Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by YetAnotherNick on Monday October 25, 2021 @04:47AM (#28985762)
Even before the sale, most of the customers are non paying. They are offering the service for free in countries with largest userbase(India and Brazil I think). I really doubt it had reached 50 million paying at any point in time.
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