alt Hacker News> 500M users paying $500M dollars
There's no way they actually earned $500M/year. Even if Whatsapp had 100 employees making $200k/year on average, that's $20M on salaries. Add an another very generous $80M on infra/admin etc costs and they'd have been making $400M profit. With that much profit achieved within such a short period, in the QE funny money era they could have IPO'd at $50-100 billion easily.
Replies
RestlessMind • 06/16/2025
Correct. I used Android phones back then and so did all my family members and most of my friends. No one I knew paid a dime for Whatsapp.
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They only had 55 employees when facebook bought them. I suspect their infrastructure costs were much less than you've suggested too. There's a reason whatsapp only supported one device: they didn't store messages after they were delivered.