• noride@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        Not true, you’re pumping their numbers up, which increases their valuation.

        • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          You are costing them money to provide servers and bandwidth for free. They don’t (as of yet) have 3rd party ads giving them any revenue from users that don’t buy anything. More freeloading users doesn’t help IPO because they already IPO’d.

          The idea that more freeloading users is a good thing is an absurd idea from the 2000 dotcom crash. I once had a potential customer call me and tried to negotiate for free web hosting under the premise that they would increase hits to my website. I laughed at them saying, “You don’t understand how any of this works. I have to buy servers for thousands of dollars. I have to pay tens of thousands a month for upstream bandwidth because I wasn’t a Tier 1 ISP. Driving traffic to my site costs me more money.”

          • hddsx@lemmy.ca
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            2 months ago

            A lot of valuation for these companies is not based on profitability, but rather on growth. So as long as you can show investors that you’re growing, they will buy in.

            Also, what are the chances they don’t have a cheaper option of using GCP/AWD/Azure/etc?