speaking as CEO for Element, we're doing okay actually. In fact we could be profitable right now, but instead we chose to hire more folks to focus on improving Element's UX and make sure we can be a FOSS alternative to Slack/Teams/Discord which if anything is a step up on UX (just as GitLab more than punches its weight against GitHub).
Sure, but you either continue expanding, never reaching profitability until you're so large you'll have to use creative monetization efforts (as Discord did), or you'll have to stop growth at some point (like IRCCloud did).
I've talked with a few of your devs at the chaos congress in leipzig, and as Quasseldroid dev and contributor to IRCv3 I know the issues too well.
The constant new features, more performance, more storage, etc as Discord offers them is just not possible in a sustainable way. Especially group video calls in massive communities of non-paying users (which is common on Discord) is just almost impossible to do in a profitable way.
That said, you've had the most success in open communication so far, and I sincerely wish you good luck with it in the future :)
