That's literally what PayPal did. They gave users $20 if you created an account. Over time, they lowered it to $10 and then $5. The program cost them ~$70m, but let them grow at 7-10% / day. They went from 800k accounts in March of 2000 to 4m in September, and then 11m in September of 2001.

In order to do that and get PayPal to acquire you for at least that much money, you'd have to convince PayPal that your users also spend money that makes it back to you. Honey's pitch probably wasn't just "we have x daily active users," but rather something like "we have x daily active users who are big e-commerce spenders, and we can make money by connecting our users with retailers."

Yes, but when potential investors or acquirers were doing their diligence, they'd find out that your cost of user acquisition was extremely high.

It's likely Honey did have a high cost of acquisition, but nowhere in the ballpark of $200/user.

Except you also need to get money from those users on a recurring basis.

Yeah but they would not be active.

That's something PayPal did initially.