Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
by rglullis on Monday October 25, 2021 @11:22AM
(#28988837)
Not true. They were charging $1/year from users in the richer markets. They could easily reach hundreds of millions per year in revenue if they followed this model.
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Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
by dntrkv on Monday October 25, 2021 @11:29AM
(#28988921)
~$30M revenue in 2014 from 600M users.
The vast majority of people will leave your service if it goes from $0 to even $1. So no, I don't think they could "easily" scale that up.
Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
by rglullis on Monday October 25, 2021 @12:44PM
(#28989975)
It didn't go from $0 to $1. It was always "$0 to most, $1 for those that really didn't care about paying because they knew that anything else would have much higher real costs"
Hell, If WhatsApp ever got to say "Facebook wants to buy us, but we are also considering changing to a pay-what-you-want model to avoid selling out", I'd easily give them $10/year without batting an eye.