“Marketing” typically includes all the people in solutions architecture, developer advocacy, compute credits, and many other things. It’s a ton more than just advertising spend, which is often a minority of what appears on that line item. Given that it’s very plausible those sort of sums are realistic.
replyMy charitable guess is that they lump the compute expense for free users as "Marketing".
replyMy less than charitable guess is that the leaked financials is a piece of fiction intended to make inference not look unprofitable.
I see what you mean. If they are using it for customer acquisition, it could fall under sales and marketing.
replyWhat about retention though? Or upselling to higher tiers?
I would question where they decided to draw the line… because it’s a grey area.