Afaik [1], there's about 5 employees and the revenue only covers server expenses while they're still trying to get more headcount. Not an expert on bootstrapping but I'm pretty sure you don't want to expand faster than your revenue does otherwise you stop being able to make all the decisions for the company.
I think another factor is the paradox that the user who has enough money to be willing to pay to not see another ad is exactly the most valuable user to advertisers— they've pre-qualified themselves on multiple axes.
So there is always going to be an enormous moral hazard here with the ad-driven-freemium model— always a temptation to run an occasional high-value ad to the paying users, or to disguise the ad as a "recommendation" or position it instead as a "sponsorship", or whatever else. Other than users reacting swiftly and decisively against this kind of thing, it's hard to know how else to keep companies away from it.
Of course this depends on how the supply demand curve looks like for their specific business.
An angry bird informed me about this :)
Though in this case, it's likely that Twitter has repeatedly run internal studies about what a paid-tier would look like, and each time concluded exactly what the GP is passing on: that it would be a net loss because the most-valuable-to-advertiser accounts would be the first ones to pay.
Even just psychologically, it would be a major blow to their sales pitch, going from "pay $X to put your name in front of the top movers and shakers in the world" to "pay $Y to put your name in front of all the Twitter users too cheap to cough up $8/mo to not have to see you." Not hard to see that $Y is going to be less than $X... probably a lot less.
Need more money? Economic model not quite working? Companies face this all the time. Some solve it innovatively, survive, and show everyone else the way forward. Others fold or pivot.
But ad revenue short-circuits the hard process of economic innovation by tempting tech companies to take an easy way out, even when the problem is solvable without it.
(All of this wouldn't really be a problem if the ads business model weren't inherently adversarial against users.)
The reason they advertise is because they can. It doesn't matter how much money they're making now, they can always make more by advertising. Paying money just makes your attention more valuable. The only way to stop them is to make it impossible or illegal to advertise. Blocking ads everywhere and making no exceptions.
EDIT: Their website says that they don’t plan to take VC money, so I have no idea what a SAFE means in this case. The point of a SAFE is that the investor is guaranteed the best terms when a priced round of investment happens.
SAFEs are often capped, so taking awhile doesn't matter so much, except maybe interest calcs
Yeah, I should use a hacked rooted Android yadda yadda. But I just spent a week hacking and hawking for my life in an ICU, and I certainly didn’t want sanity-saving podcasts to shut down whilst on an hour-long stay at the breathing machine. Life is short.
I agree that on the whole, people will continue to go for the free option, but I'm just glad that some options are appearing to pay, which rebalances the incentives a bit.