> 0) they have extreme operational expenses (they choose to invest into their own infra instead of using cloud)

As people like to point out quite often, this tends to be the cheaper way, especially at scale.

If I were implemting telegram, the MVP version would be on AWS. Then the "scales to 10M users" version would also be in AWS, but only using EC2 and no deeply integrated Amazon services. Then I'd hire a team to build it on-site for the "scales to 3B users" version of the infra.

MVP fair enough, but somewhere along the way there I'm pretty sure you'd be losing money an awful lot faster than Telegram is.

it's the same thing whatsapp did iirc.

call me dumb but i respect them.

they're going all in, they try to make the greatest financially sustainable and privacy friendly message platform or they die trying.

they're brave.

why did it take almost 9 years though? what were they thinking?!?

No marketing expense. 500 million+ users purely on the word of mouth

i meant why did it take them 9 years to realize they’re not gonna make money

The plan seems to have been bootstrapping until they could extract a few billion from the TON blockchain pump and dump. Then TON was ruled illegal so now they're into the "things we promised we'd never do" business model.

This is self-inflicted and thus doesn't deserve a lot of sympathy.

that’s the point!

now the plan is to get $2m from each ads partner, of which only $1m can be used towards ads and the remaining $1m is a “deposit” which can’t be withdrawn unless you plan to spend $10m

also consider that none of the channels can disable ads nor get any % cut

> 5) they don’t want to make money off users

I wonder why. I would be fine with paying something like "1$ per month or 10$ per year" paid-tier "Telegram Premium" subscription.