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I like Discord and use it to talk to friends while playing games, but I would be hesitant to use to use it for any big project. Unlike Slack which has a viable business model, I have to wonder what will happen when discord consumes their runway and has to start making money. A company can't live of VC funds forever. Accessibility and whatnot is obviously important, but after being 'kicked' of Slack I would be hesitant to switch to another propitiatory platform.

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Discord uses a freemium model. We have a subscription service called Nitro[0] which adds some cool non-essential perks that is very popular with our user-base.

Additionally, we run a very slim and optimized infrastructure relative to other chat apps (elixir/BEAM makes this very effective; our current VM footprint for our real time services is ~4 thousand CPUs over a hundred or so VMs). We realized early on we needed to write efficient code that is cheap to run in order to be viable as a business.

I read a blog-post back in 2016 from Slack which mentioned their footprint was in the 5k+ VMs [1]. In 2016, Slack was roughly at 1/8th the scale we are at now.

[0]: https://discordapp.com/nitro [1]: https://slack.engineering/syscall-auditing-at-scale-e6a3ca8a...

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