While building all of airbnb is hard, let's look at a clone like outdoorsy, which is airbnb for rv's. It was very functional a year ago, and i doubt if it took a decent team more than a few months. The lore of how to build for scale is now far more widely known, and anyone doing dd on a codebase can figure out if scaling a monolith will require a full scorched earth or whether its has nice modularity allowing it to scale in flight, and/or get to fairly high scale with light application of autoscale shards and now commonplace cloud methodology.

The issue is brand and usability, and wordle has it. The method for social sharing is genius, i think. A great example of privacy by design (sharing is explicit and through an image not a share button going who knows where).

It would take months to make static copies of the website and mobile apps? There are youtube videos where a single guy does it in 40 minutes.

The AWS bill and ops are definitely relevant but didn't seem to be in the spirit of the original point about it taking X days to make. I didn't take "make" to include the effort of staffing up customer service people and whatnot. Maybe I should've but I dont think that's even what the person I responded to meant.

" That's not even talking about the servers needed to serve a high volume CRUD app with built in messaging platform. "

Nah, people use way too much bloatware in that stuff. OKCupid had a big advantage over its competitors back in the day because they wrote fast code that saved them a ton of bucks on servers. Some of it is FOSS now: see okws.org . These days I'd consider seastar.io as an alternative.

They definitely bought it for the current userbase not the actual content, the NY Times article opens straight into how they are hoping to switch it to a subscription after the "initial" period.

Even if they only convert 2% of current players to 1 years worth of subscription that's 2 million of whatever "low millions" they put into it without having to grow their own userbase from scratch while competing with the original free one everyone is already using today.

It might be a defensive acquisition. They don't want free word games to be out there. They want a monopoly on word games.

> There's not much network effect for wordle.

The game is viral because of the way people share their results on social media. This is a huge network effect.

I think it's normal to acquihire for stuff like this. But I'm not confident. Maybe it's just a condition of sale that he spend a week talking to the NYT games team about the design and codebase.

They could work around that last point pretty easily. Add NYT logo top left, add NYT puzzles promo and sub up-sell on the stats page after the daily play. That could be done in a way that wasn't overbearing.