How will Discord change post IPO?
Discord is going public
News broke this week that Discord has taken concrete steps toward going public in 2025. This means they are aiming for launching on a stock exchange. Where their stock can be traded.
According to Bloomberg, the company is working with heavy hitters like JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs to prepare for an initial public offering, opting for a traditional IPO model. This comes after years of exploring other possibilities.
“No thank you” to Microsoft
On paper, this makes sense. Discord has raised hundreds of millions in funding since launching in 2015 and reportedly reached a $15 billion valuation as of 2021.
Microsoft even attempted to buy them out for $12 billion that same year [2021], but Discord said “nope”.
The company has always been careful with how it grows, especially when it comes to monetization. It’s one of the few large platforms that still feels genuinely user-focused, gives excellent value for money and just woks. Something we seldom see these days.
Like a lot of other people, I’ve used Discord regularly since 2016. What started as a tool for gaming voice chat quickly turned into a de facto communication platform. A sober replacement for social media. And I cannot shake the feeling that Discord feels to good to be free.
It became a home for extended communities: friends, creative projects, shared interests. There’s no algorithm. No ads. No data mining (at least, none that we know off). And no endless scroll designed to suck you it, it’s just chat, voice and voice. It’s social media without all the nasty bits.
But here’s the problem: is free sustainable? I don’t think so. And while Discord does have a paid model (Nitro), I’ve always felt the pricing was off.
I’d happily pay for a lightweight plan—a $1 or $2 tier that offers a few perks without going full premium. As it stands, the gap between free and paid feels too big. There’s too much value in the free version, which makes it hard to justify jumping to $10/month for small extras like emoji boosts, source video quality, and huge file uploads.
The big question
That leaves us with one big question: what happens post-IPO?
Running this machinery cannot be cheap. Think of the cost of running all these servers, giving us instant voice and video chat, globally at an instant, and paying around 900 people (my guesstimate is based on them Discord laying off 17% staff in January 2024, credit the Verge).
And what happens when shareholders enter the picture? The pressure to generate returns often leads to things we’ve all seen before; aggressive ads, we are pushed toward monetization and they sell our chat data to train AI models. .
For a service like Discord, that’s risky. The user base isn’t just active, emotionally invested. People aren’t casually browsing Discord. They live on here. A IPO move might end up squeezing value out of that loyalty fanbase. And that will hit hard.
At the end of the day, Discord is a no-fuzz service we all love and use. It’s simple, clean, and works exactly how we want it to. The problem is, and this is something we have to acknowledge; we’ve been using it for free since day one.
Because what makes Discord great isn’t just the tech — it’s that it works, our friends are here. It’s where we connect, create, and live our lives. If that gets tampered with, or monetized too aggressively, it’s not just the platform that changes, it’s the whole vibe.
And that’s a cost no IPO should ignore.