I completely agree. In this ideal situation, who pays for it? The article seems to have left this small detail out. How do you plan on getting this service to work without someone footing the bill?
Will he continue to bankroll the business -- or does he see revenue opportunities? "We will become financially sustainable at some point," he says. "It will most likely involve third-party paid apps built on the Telegram platform."
while the marginal cost of e-mail is so low that we get tonnes of spam.
Who needs to pay anything more? We already pay for the infrastructure.
1. What exactly are people paying for? 2. Is that actually necessary for messaging?
If the answer to 1 is servers, the answer to 2 is no: distributed or federated messaging is entirely reasonable and possible to do. If the answer to 1 is paid developers, the answer to 2 is no: there are plenty of developers willing to work on open source. Try it.