You are also discounting the eye-watering sums of money that were burned through to build your "success" stories and how most of those attempts crashed and burned within years or even months. Survivorship bias. The cost of all of this has been really measely and we are still here and finally even starting to think up business models. Until now, we were just frantically trying to figure out how to see each others' shitposts. Time is money. We had no money, so it takes more time. Volunteer time and a shoestring budget. Even the paid devs aren't exactly winning the lottery, or something.