FWIW, I was a paying customer. I know others who were as well. Most everyone I know, including myself as of two weeks ago, has stopped paying for the service. It had gone downhill to the point of being unusable.

There is a demand for this type of service. Real-time chat is in extremely high demand still. Chat was the number one requested feature a "build-you-own" social network startup I worked at a handful of years ago even before Facebook added their chat.