Telegram is not a business in a sense that it didn’t have any intelligible business model prior to this ads thing (which is not even live yet and this HN thread

Telegram is not a business in a sense that it didn’t have any intelligible business model prior to this ads thing (which is not even live yet and this HN thread is the first time I heard about it). For more than 7 years since its launch, the slick app, servers that instantly synchronize non-secret chats, and basically unlimited file storage were provided for free to use. Really free, no ads, no paid services. If you think about the amount of money that it all cost, it’s _insane_. So it begs the question: are Telegram’s founders really that kind of people willing to donate hundreds of millions for people’s messaging privacy with an additional option of maybe returning some of these money 7 years later with ads, or Telegram is just an elaborate FSB honeypot? I guess we’ll never know for sure, but I’m more cautious about services that offer too much for free, not too little.