Discord Revenue: How a Free Chat App Reached $1.1B and a $14.5B Valuation

Discord's revenue for 2024 is an estimated $1.1 billion, a figure the GetLatka database dates to October 2024, up from an estimated $937.6 million in December 2023. Discord is privately held and publishes no financials, so every number on this page is one of three things: a company statement, a dated press report, or a clearly labeled estimate. Where those sources disagree, we say so.

How much revenue does Discord make?

GetLatka's current estimate is $1.1 billion for 2024 (recorded October 2024), following an estimated $937.6 million for 2023. Both are estimates — Discord has never reported audited revenue — but the shape of the curve is corroborated by contemporaneous reporting. When the Wall Street Journal covered Microsoft's acquisition talks in March 2021, it reported that Discord's revenue had grown from $45 million to $130 million in 2020.

One honest wrinkle: GetLatka's table dates the $45 million figure to December 2018, while the 2021 deal-talks coverage attributed roughly the same number to 2019. Same milestone, one year apart depending on the source — we flag it rather than pick a winner.

The previous version of this article showed revenue falling from $937.6 million in 2023 to $879.4 million in 2024 while simultaneously celebrating "growth year after year." The live database shows no such decline: its 2024 estimate is $1.1 billion, up roughly 17% on 2023.

How Discord makes money: subscriptions, not ads

Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy launched Discord in May 2015 out of their game studio Hammer & Chisel, after their mobile game failed to take off. It was Citron's second act — he had sold his previous company, mobile gaming network OpenFeint, to Japan's GREE for $104 million in 2011.

The product was free and, unusually for a consumer app of its era, carried no advertising — a stance Citron defended for years on privacy and user-experience grounds. Monetization arrived in January 2017 with Nitro, a cosmetic-perks subscription priced at $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year. Server Boosts, which let members pay to upgrade a community's perks, followed in June 2019, and a cheaper $2.99 Nitro Basic tier launched in October 2022. The one big detour — a curated game store launched in late 2018 — was wound down within a year as the company refocused on Nitro.

Does the arithmetic close? At the full $99.99 annual price, $1.1 billion would imply roughly 11 million Nitro subscribers. The real paying base is larger than that, because the mix includes $2.99 Basic plans, monthly billing, and Server Boosts — but either way, against 200 million-plus monthly active users, Discord converts only a low single-digit percentage of its audience into payers. That is the model's slack, and it explains the 2024 shift: in May 2024 Discord launched sponsored Quests, promotional in-app campaigns for game publishers — its first real step toward advertising revenue after nine years of refusing it.

The $14.5B valuation — and the Microsoft deal that never closed

Per GetLatka, Discord has raised $962.3 million across 7 rounds. The milestones: a $150 million Series F in 2018 at a $2 billion valuation, a $100 million Series G in mid-2020 at $3.6 billion, and a $140 million round in late 2020 that doubled the price to $7 billion.

Then came the deal that didn't happen. In spring 2021, Microsoft held talks to acquire Discord, reported by Bloomberg at roughly $12 billion (the Wall Street Journal put it at $10 billion-plus). Discord walked away in April 2021, and by September 2021 had raised a $500 million Series H led by Dragoneer instead. Press coverage at the time rounded the valuation to about $15 billion; GetLatka's funding table records it as $14.5 billion post-money. Same round — the earlier version of this article treated the two as different events. Sony Interactive Entertainment also took a minority stake in Discord in 2021 alongside a PlayStation integration partnership.

The user numbers deserve the same dating discipline the old article skipped: the widely-cited 150 million monthly active users is a 2021-era figure, while the 200 million-plus MAU number comes from company statements in 2024, around the Quests launch. Both are true; they are three years apart.

Where that leaves Discord: roughly 2,900 employees as of October 2024 (per GetLatka), an estimated $1.1 billion in revenue, a valuation last set in 2021, and a business still carried overwhelmingly by subscriptions — with advertising, in the carefully-branded form of Quests, finally being tested against those 200 million users.