Starlink has just announced that it surpassed the inaugural mark of two million worldwide subscribers.
This is the first subscriber update in four months when Starlink had reached 1.5 million subs. Back in December 2022, Starlink had just crossed one million subscribers.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the subscriber milestones that Starlink reached since it launched in the US back in November 2020:
| Date | Number of subscribers |
| 09/2023 | 2,000,000 |
| 05/2023 | 1,500,000 |
| 12/2022 | 1,000,000 |
| 05/2022 | 400,000 |
| 03/2022 | 250,000 |
| 01/2022 | 145,000 |
| 11/2021 | 140,000 |
| 08/2021 | 90,000 |
| 06/2021 | 69,420 |
The acceleration of Starlink’s subscriber count is a direct result of its ongoing market expansion as well as the substantial increase in its constellation size and ground station network.
Starlink is now available in more than 60 countries. And in 2023 alone, Starlink was launched in 17 countries, including The Bahamas, Malawi, Malaysia, and many more.
Additionally, the launch of more satellites and ground stations expands Starlink’s total bandwidth, thus allowing it to whitelist more and more areas (like it did this week in the US).
Assuming that the average Starlink user pays $100 in subscription fees per month, then this would peg it’s annual subscription revenue at $2.4 billion (= 12 months x $100 x 2 million subs).
Interestingly, that’s still far below the estimates that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gave when he first pitched the idea of Starlink to investors back in 2015.
According to the Wall Street Journal, which received internal documents from a SpaceX insider, Musk projected that Starlink would generate $12 billion in revenue and $7 billion in profits.
Those same documents also revealed that Starlink generated $1.4 billion in revenue during the fiscal year 2022.
However, that number also includes Starlink’s other income streams such as the hardware fees or users topping up priority data.
There’s certainly still room for growth, too. Large parts of the United States have still not opened up to Residential subscribers.
Plus, countries like India, Indonesia, or South Africa (and many more) have yet to issue operating licenses, leaving even more room for growth.
Very important updates!