WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers • Hacker News Board

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#21

Post by mrich » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 8:08 AM UTC

alanfranz wrote: post #13

oblio wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was its fate anyway. Some things just can't really make money unless they do it in scummy ways (or we haven't found a viable alternative or a way to protect them). Public instant messengers, public forums, public file hosting, public image hosting.

Whatsapp used to charge 1 eur or usd per year per user. Assuming a 20% vat, that’s $800M in yearly revenue. If you spend $500k per engineer per year, you’re still left with $775M to handle infrastructure and all other expenses. Whatsapp would have been sustainable without fb. That’s the regret.

Facebook to WhatsApp team in the acquisition negotiations: "If you don't sell to us, we'll build our own and offer it for free"

And they would have been out of business sooner or later. There are enough people wanting to save that one dollar.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#22

Post by dncornholio » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 8:08 AM UTC

alanfranz wrote: post #13

oblio wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was its fate anyway. Some things just can't really make money unless they do it in scummy ways (or we haven't found a viable alternative or a way to protect them). Public instant messengers, public forums, public file hosting, public image hosting.

Whatsapp used to charge 1 eur or usd per year per user. Assuming a 20% vat, that’s $800M in yearly revenue. If you spend $500k per engineer per year, you’re still left with $775M to handle infrastructure and all other expenses. Whatsapp would have been sustainable without fb. That’s the regret.

I've used Whatsapp for a few years when they had this pricing model. Use 1 year for free and pay after. I've never paid anything and nobody who I know needed to pay to keep using WhatsApp.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#23

Post by johnfn » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 8:09 AM UTC

tdrdt wrote: post #16

"The simpler product makes it much easier to maintain and scale." This is good news for the developers, the product owners and the customers. I still can't understand why today people choose a (Javascript) stack of build systems, ton of dependencies, and all kinds of exotic tech that is the latest and most hyped. As a developer you need to support this in the future. It might be nice to build today but it will be a n…

> Personally I want to build systems.

Sure. And so do I. Specifically, I don't want to rebuild systems that have already been built for me which I can use as dependencies. And I don't want to spend all my time troubleshooting bugs, either - I'll take a well-maintained repository on GitHub with thousands of users bug-testing it for me over some janky thing some guy on another team threw together a few quarters ago before he quit.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#24

Post by seanhandley » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 8:10 AM UTC

a_humean wrote: post #12

seanhandley wrote: post #6

I wonder if WhatsApp could be considered the most successful user-facing application with an Erlang backend.

What about its original purpose, which was telecoms infrastructure?

Oh, absolutely.

I framed it this way intentionally. Without a doubt the most successful Erlang apps are telecoms related.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#25

Post by raverbashing » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 8:11 AM UTC

alanfranz wrote: post #13

oblio wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was its fate anyway. Some things just can't really make money unless they do it in scummy ways (or we haven't found a viable alternative or a way to protect them). Public instant messengers, public forums, public file hosting, public image hosting.

Whatsapp used to charge 1 eur or usd per year per user. Assuming a 20% vat, that’s $800M in yearly revenue. If you spend $500k per engineer per year, you’re still left with $775M to handle infrastructure and all other expenses. Whatsapp would have been sustainable without fb. That’s the regret.

Much cheaper than what fb makes on ads per user per year, I'm sure

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#26

Post by jfklsdfjsdf » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 8:14 AM UTC

oblio wrote: post #5

kosolam wrote: post #3

WhatsApp is a spy app of Facebook nowadays

That was its fate anyway. Some things just can't really make money unless they do it in scummy ways (or we haven't found a viable alternative or a way to protect them). Public instant messengers, public forums, public file hosting, public image hosting.

Makes me wonder just what FB will do to Whatsapp to keep the money flowing in, as FB's core app/website declines.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#27

Post by Ekaros » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 8:14 AM UTC

corobo wrote: post #14

Is there even a correlation between scale and engineers, other than scale = VC money = hire more cause we can afford it?

I would expect there to be certain scaling. Specially when you move to more severs and more redundancy. Cloud solves part, but still not everything. If single person can support 10k or 100k users. You might still need more than that one to move to million or hundred million.

Also some features like language support and such get more complicated when you want to widen userbase from just English speaking ones.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#28

Post by feketegy » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 8:16 AM UTC

tdrdt wrote: post #16

"The simpler product makes it much easier to maintain and scale." This is good news for the developers, the product owners and the customers. I still can't understand why today people choose a (Javascript) stack of build systems, ton of dependencies, and all kinds of exotic tech that is the latest and most hyped. As a developer you need to support this in the future. It might be nice to build today but it will be a n…

> exotic tech that is the latest and most hyped

You answered your own question. Because it's "exotic" and "hyped".

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#29

Post by nodejs_rulez_1 » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 8:16 AM UTC

tdrdt wrote: post #16

"The simpler product makes it much easier to maintain and scale." This is good news for the developers, the product owners and the customers. I still can't understand why today people choose a (Javascript) stack of build systems, ton of dependencies, and all kinds of exotic tech that is the latest and most hyped. As a developer you need to support this in the future. It might be nice to build today but it will be a n…

> ...As a developer you need to support this in the future. It might be nice to build today but it will be a nightmare later.

But the sort of people choosing a JS stack are quite quick to move on. Make a mess, slap a new achievement on CV and dash.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#30

Post by grardb » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 8:17 AM UTC

harpratap wrote: post #18

alanfranz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatsapp used to charge 1 eur or usd per year per user. Assuming a 20% vat, that’s $800M in yearly revenue. If you spend $500k per engineer per year, you’re still left with $775M to handle infrastructure and all other expenses. Whatsapp would have been sustainable without fb. That’s the regret.

You are very naively assuming it would actually reach 1B users if it was paid.

Technically, but GP is allocating over 95% of post-tax revenue to everything other than engineer salaries, which is probably extremely generous.

WhatsApp had 200M users in February 2013[1], which was a year before they were acquired by Facebook. Perhaps they wouldn't have gotten to 1B users without Facebook, but I'm sure they still would've grown in the last ~8 years, and fewer users likely results in lower costs. My guess is they would still be doing very well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp