win.rar GmbH is a German corporation and as such is required to post their financial statements to the federal "Handelsregister". If you google the exact company name, you'll quickly find the Northdata site for them (Northdata is a crawler that aggregates Handelsregister data) [1]. According to that, they made ~1M€ in earnings in 2023.

[1] https://www.northdata.com

There are some clues:

https://x.com/WinRAR_RARLAB/status/1703723906945691890

Most of their revenue comes from corporate licenses.

I find it amusing that, of all things, WinRAR has a community manager and said community manager has fully embraced the meme culture - and there is even merchandise[0] for it.

[0] https://in.tern.et/collections/winrar (linked by the official twitter)

Ha that messenger bag is great

I don't understand why companies pay for those licenses -- what are the use cases where you have to use WinRAR instead of 7-Zip or something else?

I've encountered at least a couple of 'it's free/Russian/doesn't have support' explanations from people on the web.

WinRAR compression winow is more ergonomic for certain workflows

You're on the internet my friend, you can literally just look this up yourself with half a minute of searching.

This isn't some fact that is going to appear in the encyclopedia Brittanica. If you actually search for it, you'll find a bunch of content like "if you assume they sell 5 million copies per year at $10 per copy, then they must make $50M/year!!".

I won't say it's likely, but a number of times on this very forum I got the inside scoop by asking a question and having someone in the know respond directly to me. Off the top of my head, Patrick Collision and Walter Bright have filled me in on details that people otherwise just speculated about online.

Both of them probably lost some hard-to-quantify money when divulging such info, pricing obscurity is a tool many negotiators use, transparency kills such tools, of course when competition forces internal prices to be revealed the dynamics change but in general there is little to gain business wise.

Except in this case it is? As user "from_endor" has pointed out in the mean time, you can just look up the business filings for the company (provided you use their full, official name of course)

I worked for a large-ish software company that had paid for a WinRAR license once upon a time, and that AFAIK still uses WinRAR for certain mission-critical tasks to this day. We often joked that we were the only people who had ever actually paid for a legitimate copy of WinRAR - although sounds like we were far from alone!