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.

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 https://discordapp.com/nitro [1]: https://slack.engineering/syscall-auditing-at-scale-e6a3ca8ac1b8 https://slack.engineering/syscall-auditing-at-scale-e6a3ca8a...