Could someone shed a light on economics of working on such kind of a project?
Aren't developing third-party client for the entity which you do not control and somehow compete with is typically a futile experience?
Doesn't it go against most of ToS-es directly (e.g. Discord/WhatsApp happily ban accounts using third-party clients) or indirectly (I guess no proprietary chat platform will be exactly happy having third-party clients that compete with their official and controlled app).
I mean how people justify building a business on it given that it essentially means that they have to play on the other's people playground by the rules which can be changed at any time. Like tomorrow Slack would decide to disallow any third-party apps and you're done.
It’s very risky to build a service that relays directly on the API layer of other commercial services. If any of there chat apps change their APIs to stop Beeper traffic then they will lose users. Some services will cause a larger loss than others.
I think the economics are simple. The company is two devs and they charge $10/month. If the costs are $4/month/user then they need 83k users to clear a quarter million a year in profit per dev. This isn’t a unicorn, but it has the potential to bring in good money while it lasts.
Aren't developing third-party client for the entity which you do not control and somehow compete with is typically a futile experience?
Doesn't it go against most of ToS-es directly (e.g. Discord/WhatsApp happily ban accounts using third-party clients) or indirectly (I guess no proprietary chat platform will be exactly happy having third-party clients that compete with their official and controlled app).
I mean how people justify building a business on it given that it essentially means that they have to play on the other's people playground by the rules which can be changed at any time. Like tomorrow Slack would decide to disallow any third-party apps and you're done.