Discord

GitPod

Discord

Discord makes money primarily through Nitro — a $9.99/month subscription that gives users bigger file uploads, HD video streaming, custom emoji, animated avatars, and profile customization. There's also Nitro Basic at $2.99/month with fewer perks.

Server owners can pay for Server Boosts that unlock premium features for their community. Discord also added a cut of server subscriptions — creators can charge monthly membership fees and Discord takes 10%.

The key insight is that Discord's core product is completely free. Voice chat, text chat, screen sharing, communities with thousands of members — all free.

Nitro is cosmetic and convenience upgrades. Most users never pay and Discord is fine with that.

The free users create the network effects that make the platform valuable.

GitPod

GitPod started as freemium: a free tier of monthly cloud hours, paid plans for more hours and bigger workspaces, and enterprise contracts with self-hosted and dedicated options. As Ona it shifted toward enterprise contracts for running AI coding agents inside a customer's own cloud, with governance and security controls.

It said enterprise annual recurring revenue quadrupled year over year before the rename. OpenAI acquired the company in 2026, and existing customer commitments continue to be supported.

Discord

Jason Citron had already built and sold a gaming company — OpenFeint, a social gaming platform for mobile, which GREE bought for $104 million in 2011. After that, he started Hammer & Chisel, a game studio that was supposed to make mobile games.

The game they built, called Fates Forever, was a mobile MOBA that got great reviews but almost nobody played.

What Citron noticed was that gamers were using terrible tools to communicate. TeamSpeak was clunky.

Skype was laggy. Nothing worked well for groups of people who needed to talk while gaming.

The internal voice and text chat tool that Hammer & Chisel had built for their own team worked better than anything on the market.

Citron and co-founder Stan Vishnevskiy pivoted the entire company. They stripped out the gaming stuff and launched Discord in May 2015 as a free voice, video, and text chat platform for gamers.

It spread through Reddit first — a post on the r/gaming subreddit went viral and crashed their servers on day one. Within a year they had 25 million registered users.

GitPod

The GitPod team came out of TypeFox, a German developer tools company in Kiel behind the Theia cloud IDE framework. Sven Efftinge and his colleagues realized the biggest pain point was not the editor itself but the environment.

Developers spent hours configuring machines, installing dependencies and debugging "it works on my machine" problems.

They launched GitPod to provide instant, automated cloud development environments. One click from a GitHub or GitLab repo opened a fully configured workspace with dependencies installed and tools ready.

Johannes Landgraf, who became CEO, and CTO Christian Weichel later led the company through its rename to Ona in 2025 and its sale to OpenAI in 2026.

Discord

Discord grew through communities, not ads. The first users were gamers on Reddit and Twitch who were sick of TeamSpeak and Skype.

Streamers would set up Discord servers for their fans, and every viewer who joined brought their friends. The growth was entirely organic for years.

The bot ecosystem was the secret weapon. Discord made it trivially easy to build bots — automated programs that add functionality to servers.

Music bots, moderation bots, gaming bots, utility bots. Developers built tens of thousands of bots, each one making Discord servers more useful and sticky.

A server with good bots became a mini-app platform.

COVID and the "beyond gaming" shift were massive. When lockdowns hit, study groups, book clubs, art communities, crypto communities, and just friend groups all started using Discord.

By 2020, non-gaming usage overtook gaming usage. Discord quietly dropped the "for gamers" tagline and rebranded as a platform for communities of all kinds.

GitPod

GitPod grew through open source community adoption and one-click integrations with GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket, where a "Gitpod" button on a repo launched a ready workspace. It later moved upmarket to banks and pharmaceutical companies that wanted cloud development under tight security.

In 2025 it bet the company on AI agents, renaming itself Ona and claiming its own agents were producing most of its merged code. That bet ended in a sale to OpenAI in 2026.

Discord

Monetization has been the eternal question. Discord has 200 million monthly active users but has never turned a profit.

Nitro subscriptions are growing but most users are happy on the free tier. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, Discord doesn't run ads — they've explicitly said ads in DMs or chat would destroy the product.

Finding ways to monetize without betraying user trust is the core challenge.

The Microsoft acquisition saga. In early 2021, Microsoft reportedly offered $12 billion to buy Discord.

Citron and the board walked away. The thinking was that Discord could grow into something worth much more independently.

Whether that was the right call depends on whether Discord can eventually figure out profitability — Microsoft would have solved that problem instantly with its distribution.

Content moderation at scale is brutal. With millions of servers and hundreds of millions of users, Discord has struggled with harmful content — extremist groups, CSAM, doxxing, and harassment.

They've invested heavily in trust and safety teams and automated detection, but the decentralized nature of servers makes moderation much harder than a centralized feed like Twitter or Facebook.

GitPod

GitHub Codespaces, backed by Microsoft and GitHub's enormous distribution, was a direct competitor, and AWS stopped taking new Cloud9 customers in 2024, a sign of how tough the cloud IDE market was. Convincing developers to give up their carefully configured laptops proved hard.

Then AI coding tools threatened to make the whole category a feature. GitPod's answer was to reinvent itself as Ona, an AI agent platform, and ultimately to sell to OpenAI in 2026 rather than compete alone.

Discord

Discord's core is servers — community spaces organized into text and voice channels. Think of a server like a clubhouse with different rooms for different topics.

Voice Channels let you drop in and out of audio conversations like a walkie-talkie. Stage Channels are for live audio events with audiences.

Forum Channels organize discussions by topic. Discord also has direct messaging, group chats, video calls, screen sharing, and a growing app/bot ecosystem.

Activities let users play games and watch videos together inside Discord calls.

GitPod

Before 2025: cloud development environments, instant pre-configured workspaces defined in a .gitpod.yml file, with prebuilds and support for VS Code and JetBrains, plus a self-hosted enterprise option. As Ona (since September 2025): a platform for running software engineering AI agents in secure, sandboxed cloud environments, with VS Code in the browser and access from phone, tablet or laptop.

Since August 2026 the technology is part of OpenAI's Codex team.

Discord

Benchmark, Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Greenoaks Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Spark Capital, Fidelity Investments

GitPod

Speedinvest led the $3 million seed in October 2020, with Crane Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures US. General Catalyst led a $13 million round in April 2021.

GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner led the $25 million Series A in November 2022. Total funding was about $41 million.