And it's dirt cheap
Before the war in Ukraine I had stable 1 Gbit/s for 5$/month with two dedicated IPs
Here in Ireland you get 100 Kbits/s sometimes because they can't pull you a fiber connection and 4G towers are overloaded to hell, and it costs 20-40€/month
For a long time it was ran on money that Durov made from VK and it's selling deal and had no ads, almost perfect development. It was a ton of money obviously, but we all knew it would run out sooner or later and then everything would change. I bought premium once because I wanted to support the project, and I still use it. Hopefully I won't have to use anything else, because I hate almost any other messenger.
Edit: forgot "would"