Signal’s president reveals the cost of running the privacy-preserving platform—not just to drum up donations, but to call out the for-profit surveillance business models it competes against.
The encrypted messaging and calling app Signal has become a one-of-a-kind phenomenon in the tech world: It has grown from the preferred encrypted messenger for the paranoid privacy elite into a legitimately mainstream service with hundreds of millions of installs worldwide. And it has done this entirely as a nonprofit effort, with no venture capital or monetization model, all while holding its own against the best-funded Silicon Valley competitors in the world, like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Gmail, and iMessage.
Today, Signal is revealing something about what it takes to pull that off—and it’s not cheap. For the first time, the Signal Foundation that runs the app has published a full breakdown of Signal’s operating costs: around $40 million this year, projected to hit $50 million by 2025.
Signal’s president, Meredith Whittaker, says her decision to publish the detailed cost numbers in a blog post for the first time—going well beyond the IRS disclosures legally required of nonprofits—was more than just as a frank appeal for year-end donations. By revealing the price of operating a modern communications service, she says, she wanted to call attention to how competitors pay these same expenses: either by profiting directly from monetizing users’ data or, she argues, by locking users into networks that very often operate with that same corporate surveillance business model.
“By being honest about these costs ourselves, we believe that helps provide a view of the engine of the tech industry, the surveillance business model, that is not always apparent to people,” Whittaker tells WIRED. Running a service like Signal—or WhatsApp or Gmail or Telegram—is, she says, “surprisingly expensive. You may not know that, and there’s a good reason you don’t know that, and it’s because it’s not something that companies who pay those expenses via surveillance want you to know.”
Signal pays $14 million a year in infrastructure costs, for instance, including the price of servers, bandwidth, and storage. It uses about 20 petabytes per year of bandwidth, or 20 million gigabytes, to enable voice and video calling alone, which comes to $1.7 million a year. The biggest chunk of those infrastructure costs, fully $6 million annually, goes to telecom firms to pay for the SMS text messages Signal uses to send registration codes to verify new Signal accounts’ phone numbers. That cost has gone up, Signal says, as telecom firms charge more for those text messages in an effort to offset the shrinking use of SMS in favor of cheaper services like Signal and WhatsApp worldwide.
Another $19 million a year or so out of Signal’s budget pays for its staff. Signal now employs about 50 people, a far larger team than a few years ago. In 2016, Signal had just three full-time employees working in a single room in a coworking space in San Francisco. “People didn’t take vacations,” Whittaker says. “People didn’t get on planes because they didn’t want to be offline if there was an outage or something.” While that skeleton-crew era is over—Whittaker says it wasn’t sustainable for those few overworked staffers—she argues that a team of 50 people is still a tiny number compared to services with similar-sized user bases, which often have thousands of employees.
read more: https://www.wired.com/story/signal-operating-costs/
archive link: https://archive.ph/O5rzD
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I’m dead serious wtf is signal? It’s like texting but all texting apps just go through it? Or something?
Signal is a chat app. It uses phone numbers for identity verification and friend discovery but messages go over an end-to-end encrypted protocol. While open source, it uses a centralized network and a single client.
It’s somewhere between Matrix and WhatsApp. Open Source and friendly, but still centralized and anchored to phone numbers.
I’ve been using signal since forever. Recently when there was a big exodus from Whatsapp because of their changed data policies was the first time I felt an impact with response time in the app etc. I immediately set up a regular donation. A few months later they came out with there cryptocurrency scheme I decided I won’t be funding any cryptocurrency so I cancelled my donations. I trust signal on the technical side implicitly. But they have lost my trust in the business side :/
The crypto highly annoys me too and I was against it, but we can turn it off and nothing changes which is good. I still believe the dev time should have gone elsewhere. But I’m not as bothered as I was in the begining. Same with stories, never used it before signal in other platforms and had to study wtf they were when it appeared on signal. Now I can see and understand a bit of the use case but I have never seen any of my dozens of friends that use signal use that feature. Still something that can be turned off. I’ve used it to share memes.
Anyway, they claimed heavily that there were markets that would absolutely require that feature since people are used to it in other chat platforms, and if it really brings people to a better platform that is signal I’m ok with it. What I’d really like to see is if the claim now holds true or not and understand if the dev and money time spent in those features really got more users in the app or not and if it was worth the cost vs other features.
Lost me (and many family members) when they dropped support for SMS.
And yes, I will keep on bringing that up on every topic about Signal.
This was a bad move and I’m sure Signal has been bleeding their userbase ever since they have done it.
Same here. It was basically the only way to convince non technical users to use it. It’s a better texting client than the default Android messages app.
Their user base has grown tremendously since they dropped support for SMS. Just read the article.
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19M a year for 50 people ? that would be 380.000/person. Surely there’s an error here somewhere lol Unless we’re talking rupees
Yeah, that seems shady at least, what kind of salaries are they getting?
Where I live in europe, IT people usually hace salaries between 30.000 and 80.000. And it is considered a pretty good salary.
Could be that that is employee headcount and not including contractors.
It’s not exclusively peer to peer, so there must be infrastructure, no?
nah they say 19m is for their almost 50 employees. 14m is infrastructure, 6m of which is for texts to confirm, apparently. Which also… seems like way too much? 6 million for text messages? Are they confirming 390 million new accounts a year? Quick google says its .79 cents a text. 2x that to receive also and… yeah… I’m pretty sure that ain’t right. Like I get the 8 mil a year for data, cuz yeah it is a lot. Texts should probably be 1m assuming 50mil new accounts a year. I could see 10m for the 50 people, that is $200,000 on average. So… half what they claim seems reasonable.
Are you including the office space/associated costs with employing someone as well? I was once told it costs approx 100k to have me in my seat before the cost of my salary was accounted for, not sure how much BS that was, but 100k was multiples of my salary at the time.
I mean, I could see them trying to say costs for buying land and building shit and furnishing and etc. sure, but again this is YEARLY costs, not startup costs. I do assume there is some of that included in the budget but its not listed anywhere. I mean I GUESS that could be listed under budget for staff but that seems… very disingenuous.
Things like health insurance, etc. are yearly costs though and that stuff does end up adding up. There should also be some recurring taxes that an employer has to pay per employee that aren’t part of income tax withholding (i.e. doesn’t show up as part of an employee’s paystub).
Wages themselves are not the full cost of an employees total payroll expense, since that would also include taxes and benefits. And then you have to figure their expenditure for business equipment (work computer, phone, printer, etc), licenses for job-specific software they use, total cost of the square-footage of office space they need, etc.
You could say office space and furniture and even IT infrastructure are sunk costs but they do need to be constantly maintained and expanded upon as the company grows. Adding a person to the payroll means the company has grown. They may not need a bigger office, or more servers, until they hire a few more people, but then at that point they will need it.
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Ah the push notifications makes a lot of sense, the article said that was just for SMS messages to confirm messages and that seemed way too much, but push notifications is probably right.
And yeah, I guess I assumed most of those costs wouldn’t be labelled staff budget, but idk I’m not an accountant lol. Still that seems to be a lot for 50 people yearly.
If signal is run by 50 people, I have a pretty good hunch that the majority of them are very well paid developers and engineers, and IT…and a rather small amount of lower-paid administrative staff.
Keep in mind that they need to be able to send SMS worldwide and roaming is a thing. Especially if you have to deal prices with all the telco in the world
If all the employees are located in the highest cost of living area in the world, it kinda makes sense.
Gotta pay those insane housing costs somehow.
Good. People creating useful non-profit services should be paid a lot. And according to their financial reports (somebody linked in another comment) it’s not biased towards executive pay.
As long as it doesn’t end up eventually bringing down the entire service.
C*Os probably eat a la4ge portion of it. Not even breaching into VPs and Senior Managers
Well there it is, they can make savings easily afaic
I find it amusing they don’t accept donations via their own cryptocurrency 🫠
I think it’s sad more like it. One of Cryptos’ actual real world promise was workable micropayments, and that would’ve made a lot of sense as a payment method for a service like this. Like pay either a smallish block sum every month or a tiny amount for every message you send out.
And of course sadder still that Signal has a crypto integrated into it and failed to make it work for anything else but a cryptobro get-rich-quick scheme.
I guess it turned out that nobody wants to implement micropayments because one of their qualities would have to be extremely tiny processing fees which both means that the implementation has to be highly efficient (so it won’t waste the already small margins on computing resources) and the implementing party has to be able to stomach very low profits until traffic gets huge.
You can also do micropayments without crypto.
I’m guessing it has to do with money laundering/tracking etc.
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I think Marlinspike’s weird crypto turn is what got him pushed out so we now have the wonderful Meredith the first tech company leader I’ve ever looked up to.
Hopefully they remove that crypto thing from it.
Lol
Their leadership team made about 5 million dollars per year in 2022, with about $500K/year compensations for most of them. Some comments here suggest that those compensations have risen sharply recently.
Perhaps consider whether this is a good place to donate. And also, it’s so shitty that we were conditioned to think that every service is “free” of charge. In an ideal world, Signal could fix all of these problems by firing 80% of their C-team and instituting a modest subscription fee. But then 90% of their users would just fuck off to some place that is “free” but makes much more money from selling their data.
Jim O’leary (Vp, Engineering) $666,909 $0 $33,343
Ehren Kret (Chief Technology Officer) $665,909 $0 $8,557
Aruna Harder (Chief Operating Officer) $444,606 $0 $20,500
Graeme Connell (Software Developer) $444,606 $0 $35,208
Greyson Parrelli (Software Developer) $422,972 $0 $35,668
Jonathan Chambers (Software Developer) $420,595 $0 $28,346
Meredith Whittaker (Director / Pres Of Signal Messenger) $191,229 $0 $6,032I don’t know why developers are making more than the president of the company here, but that’s nice to see.
Usually the person setting the wages is setting their own wage higher than the rest.
It’s also wild to me that some developers are making nearly half a million a year. I can’t even crack 100k in my local currency (about $75k/yr USD) and my job is to run the infrastructure. If I don’t do my job, the company goes offline and all that fancy programming amounts for nothing.
US tech wages are just nuts. In the UK I’m basically maxed out for a non-London based software dev at about £70k (~$87k). Meanwhile I have a friend who has managed to land a job with a London based US tech firm on about £120k (~$150k) which is massive for here but reading this is still a long way off what is possible.
You think wages are high here but forget that the USA has no healthcare, no mental healthcare, no social safety networks for if you lose your job, and suffers from overpriced food+housing just like everyone else.
You also get nickle and dime’d for literally everything, including having to tip if you eat out, tip to ride in an Uber, have food delivery, or exist. Drivers licenses cost money. Your birth certificate does. Your car insurance costs. If you can even afford an overpriced car even used.
And even if you get get healthcare through your job, it still sucks. You still pay “co pays” and “deductibles” just to receive care. If you get care at all that is - if the insurance company “decides” to cover your scan.
And you still owe whatever percentage after that insurance doesn’t cover. Say your important surgery is $100k in costs (yes they cost that much here often). Even with decent insurance you’re still owing thousands afterwards, more than likely depending on the insurance plan.
Forget getting an ambulance for emergencies. Even if your insurance covers it, it may be “out of the insurance network” and therefore not covered, but how could you know that? You’re unconscious. And you better tell your body not to get cancer either or into a serious accident, because that can run your medical bills into the millions.
The USA has no decent vacation time, has no required maternity leave or medical leave. You will eat your own childcare costs into the thousands, and some people’s partners opt to stay home rather than work to absorb those.
this i worked in an american company and many people move to europe and accept half the salary because its still better financially speaking.
I live in a country with Universal healthcare coverage (Canada) and we pay for our healthcare with income taxes and goods and services tax; so I fail to see why this should matter.
The key difference is a single payer system. We the people (represented by the government) can basically set the prices of our own healthcare procedures to a figure that is appropriate for how much each person helping to perform the procedure costs for their time and effort in the process, the costs of running the equipment, and some for the wear/tear/maintenance on that equipment. Whatever is left over goes towards replacing the machine at its end of life.
In the USA, hospitals are run as for-profit businesses, so the extra cost (usually 100% or more profit per procedure, or whatever they can get away with charging) is added on for the profit margin of the hospital, and the insurance companies and whatnot is also run as for-profit, jacking up prices even more.
It’s not that citizens of the US are paying for these procedures themselves that makes it expensive; Everyone pays for medical in some way, shape or form, just the USA seems to be okay with extorting its own citizens for profit in the process of helping them. It’s a toxic system that causes people to be forced into extreme poverty when they’re too poor to pay for insurance; which is insane to me, since you’re effectively beating the poors until they’re homeless and destitute then blaming them for their own homelessness and shunning them for being homeless when all they wanted to do was not be sick/injured.
The measure of a society is how it treats its weakest members.
For anyone wondering: First number is base, second is related, third is other. I have no clue what those terms mean.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840
My guess base is what is written in contract, related or other probably means bonuses or maybe overtime.
Here’s the thing with pay: they can either pay these people or find someone who will accept less.
These employees have options. Signal is competing with other companies to hire them, so the pay is determined by that market.
As for the “free” part, yep, the consumer determines the value here, and since most people are pretty content with garbage like SMS or WhatsApp (which is monetized by your data), “free” is what Signal is competing with.
Fortunately, those of us “in the know” have the opportunity to promote a free app to help build the network effect, and we can financially contribute as part of that.
(Not criticizing, just adding perspective).
Sounds completely fine.
Remember we need competent, motivated folks top to bottom. They are certainly getting offers from other organizations to go work for them.
We also don’t want them “needing” to accept bribes
Their leadership team is not overpaid relative to the industry and they are highly deserved of those salaries. They make an excellent product. The point isn’t that the leadership team makes 5mil between them, a drop in the bucket of the 50mil total operating cost. It’s hard to read your comment as anything but disingenuous.
While I agree that they’re not being overpaid, 10% is a rather large drop in the bucket. Do they need that many to run an organization of 50 people, though? Perhaps they do, I don’t claim to know.
As a historical comparison, before selling out to Facebook, Whatsapp had 35 engineers, providing service to 450 million users. But perhaps they were selling their data at that point already, making this a bad comparison.
Yeah, and about that historical comparison… WhatsApp sold out for $21bn. Signals top earners collectively would have to work for 4200 years to get there.
Those guys deserve every cent of their paycheck, because probably any of them could easily earn multiple of that at another company… given their skills and knowledge in the field.
The biggest miracle is them not selling out.
Jfc thank you this shit feels like astroturfing in favor of the major big techs like facebook
Shitting on a company’s shit pay strucute is reasonable, but you can’t ignore that this is always a choice between other options. Google and Apple are at least as bad in that regard, and they’re worse in other ways. Steps in the right direction are better than not doing anything because there’s no perfect option. When you do that, things get worse, because the companies will force you to take steps the wrong way.
There’s something kind of funny about one of the largest expenses being SMS and voice calls to verify phone numbers when one of the largest complaints about signal is the phone number requirement. I wonder how much this cost factors into them considering dropping the phone number requirement.
Interestingly this phone number complaint only shows up among techies and especially Americans. You guys don’t get to keep your phone number? I’ve had the same number now for 20 years here in Europe, it may as well be synonymous with my identity.
In fact, I’d say the phone number requirement, or at least option, actually promotes adoption in parts of the world. I wouldn’t have been able to get my mother to use Signal if it didn’t work with a phone number, for instance. She’s not gonna make an account just for a chat app. Phone number she already has.
It’s actually a privacy issue because your phone number is tied to your physical identity so deeply that giving it out is giving too much away.
because people might feel uncomfortable sending unnecessary personal information to another party, especially if it does not change often, like the telephone number?
I’m mostly contacting people I already know so using phone number (something I already have a collection of) is very handy to me
My kids don’t have a phone number and I would be glad we could use Signal.
should be optional.
Exactly because I have the same phone number for almost 30 years, that is the problem. It’s too deep interlaced with my real and personal identity and I regard it as a very private thing that only few people should have.
I don’t get the idea that a phone number should just be randomly given as if it was natural.
It’s good to have it as an option for example so my mother can use it simply and quickly, but when I go to a conference and want to connect to new people which are still strangers and will and don’t give my phone number. So in those situations I have to randomly use other chat system or share emails? When signal already is in my pocket and my main chat application 99% of the time and is perfect for 1 to 1 friendly chats?
Phone numbers will still be required to sign up, you only won’t need it to add a contact.
Seriously? Boo :(
Probably helps cut down on spam and bot accounts
If they drop the phone number requirements, you will get spam, a lot of spam. Much more than now.
Make phone numbers optional and add a setting to allow/forbid accounts with no phone number to message you. I bet phone numbers have zero effect on the level of spam.
Because there are no other possible verifications apart from phone numbers? Do you open a bank account with your phone number, because it’s the only way?
I open a bank account with a copy of my id, a copy of a bill to my adress, and some money. My phone number can be used along the process, like for a digital signature.
What would you think would be an appropriate alternative to easily verify chat accounts that’s cheaper than validating phone numbers?
Use a 3d face scan, but only send the hash over the net. Can double for account recovery (when user has no email or something)
That’s a joke right?
If not: It does not matter what hash I send, because it’s cryptographically impossible to tell what the hashed thing is. That is the whole point of a hash.
Also: sending a hash over the network instead of a password or whatever the source material is would be a bad practice from security perspective, if not a directly exploitable vulnerability. It would mean that anyone that knows the hash can pretend to be you, because the hash would be used to authenticate and not whatever the source material is. The hash would become the real password and the source material nothing more than a mnemonic for the user. Adding to that: the server storing the hash would store a plaintext password.
The point is to protect your face data, the hash IS the password, but you don’t want people to be able to tell how you look like by sending the raw images of your face over the net
That would do nothing to validate that the user is real, they can just insert any hash and claim it’s their face’s hash. At that point we can just use regular passwords, but as I said that won’t solve the spam Accounts issue.
It would mean that anyone that knows the hash can pretend to be you, because the hash would be used to authenticate and not whatever the source material is.
Guess what happens to passwords themselves? Same thing, but user can’t just add nonce. Replay attacks are super easy to mitigate and hashing makes it easier.
Not saying that biometry authentication isn’t shit for security itself.
Honestly, I’m not sure what you are talking about. Could you elaborate more?
Are you implying that sending some hash is better than sending the secret and let the server deal with it?
Where would one get a 3d face scan from? For my part, I don’t have a scanning rig set up anywhere.
You turn your face in different angles, creating a 3d scan of your face using your phone camera
Video call, email, other verificated factors.
So do you think this is the only option available?
You think a verification via a video call is cheaper than SMS…?
That’s not to mention the potential concerns that would arise around the possibility of signal storing (some portion of) the video…
Nope, just saying phone numbers are far from the only option. And if telcos are price gauging you should look at the alternatives.
No you’ve complained and insinuated there are plenty of other solutions that the world class team at Signal, literally the preminent experts in their field, chose not to use - and then offered to some truly next level terrible options.
Nope, just saying phone numbers are far from the only option.
What would you think would be an appropriate alternative to easily verify chat accounts that’s cheaper than validating phone numbers?
It’s the cheaper portion that’s the issue. There are “other options”, but they’re not cheaper and/or they have their own issues.
I didn’t touch the email case because email addresses can be so rapidly created (even out of thin air via a catch all style inbox) there’s nothing to it.
Video call is expensive, and frankly, if I’m gonna sign up at a private service, I’m not going to make a damn video call.
Email is not enough to go against spam. Email addresses are basically an Infinite Ressource.
Other verified factors are nothing concrete. Sure we could all use security hardware keys, but what’s the chances that my mom has one?
Other verified factors are nothing concrete. Sure we could all use security hardware keys, but what’s the chances that my mom has one?
PKI doesn’t require hardware keys
True, but it’s not exactly User friendly too, right? If not, tell me. I’ll be happy.
So you do think that phone numbers are the only way to verify the person? This is just stupid. There are enough, like IDs or stuff like that. If you don’t want that, that’s a totally different story.
Jesus Christ you Linux people never learn… It’s 👏 about 👏 ease of 👏 use.
If they wanted it to be a pain in the ass and for nobody to use they could put on a ui on top of pgp and call it a day.
It’s a bad problem no? Combatting “spam” Accounts while balancing privacy.
Personally, I don’t want to give them any more information than is really necessary.
Captchas or other challenges, and better spambot detection.
Those are already in place. They don’t suffice.
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That’s actually a pretty good idea.
I’m guessing you generate a unique address to share with someone, and then they add you. Spam is literally solved and it becomes more private.
Might want to think twice before donating to this company that’s eating up $40m/year with 50 employees.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the company that is dominating the privacy-messaging space, considered and discarded this idea for reasons they consider valid.
🤡
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A phone number is not “boat loads of data”.
I mean, your phone number can be used to find out everything about you.
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I’d be ok with a credit card verification or so something like that, even if still uncomfortable for me, but I hear it reduces a lot of spam.
But then that would make people confused and make them run away when the app seems to be free and now is asking for a credit card validation… it’s too strange.
Anyway I never got a single spam message on signal from all the years I use it, so not sure how others view the problem or even if it is a problem.
Now I want to know more about that $6 million annually spent on SMS messages… That seems like a ridiculously unnecessary cost, wonder if some startup can wedge into the market and undercut the competition.
Signal use phone number for account identification. SMS is essential to verify that the phone number you used on your signal account is belong to you. This could be the real motivation for signal’s recent attempt to start allowing their users to contact other users using their username instead of phone number.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they keep the SMS verification to keep the number of superfluous accounts to a minimum, which would likely greatly exceed the $6m operating costs. I also wonder if that $6m included their now defunct SMS integration, and if that cost has changed at all.
It’s also worth noting that while SMS is typically nowadays a free feature, it wasn’t always as such. It used to be that users were charged per message, especially in Europe, which is why Europeans tend to rely on messaging services instead of SMS; US carriers made SMS free only maybe 10-15 years ago, and that was only to US based numbers. When you’re dealing with many people that are international, such as in the EU, that adds up quickly. SMS is a Telco utility, and they tend to be, er, behind the times as it were. Remember that when you’re an internet-based service and you want to interface with a Telco utility, ie via SMS, they charge a tarrif, like a toll road. While Telco utilities are all digital and voip-equivalent based these days, they are still a private network and charge fees to access. And I am now rambling so I’ll stop here.
I remember once a girl I was friends with lamenting that someone sent her two text messages when it could’ve been one, because each one counted against the free quota before you were charged per text.
And god forbid special characters
Yup, the late 90s to mid 00s we’re an interesting time
Right, the reason why SMS is used was explained in the excerpt, I’m not asking about that. I guess what I’m curious about is how badly the telecom firms they’re purchasing SMS services from are price gouging, and if they are, why there hasn’t been a startup in this space
You mean startup for sending SMS? That would have to be a real telco, otherwise it would just be a front that is essentially renting capabilities from an established telco - and it would suffer the same fees/rates as Signal. Either way, really expensive to operate, with no real benefit to show for it.
I mean… yeah. A real telco. I figure it has to be one of a few things:
a) The profit margins baked into existing SMS services are razor-thin and there’s no room for a startup to undercut that (unlikely);
b) The monopoly of the existing telcos is thorough enough that they can shut out newcomers;
c) The initial costs of any potential newcomers are great enough that nobody can secure funding;
d) Nobody both wealthy and moral enough has had this idea yet
In my country, all carrier here would block bulk SMS sending (and terminate your phone number if they think you abuse it) unless they come from a special short number account (e.g. those with 4 - 5 digits phone number), and those account is not cheap. That’s where the telcos made money from sms these days now that ordinary people don’t use sms much. They would partner with api providers such as Twillio to setup the account. You can review Twilio international sms pricing for an overview of sms prices across the globe. In my country, it’s 50x more expensive than US.
They should make it possible for the community to help out with server resources. Relay or decrentralize it maybe.
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Relay or decrentralize it maybe.
The thing I read about this earlier said Signal is super against decentralization iirc. Or at least against federation? Are they different?
I suppose it could be decentralized without being federated. Every node would just be a part of the single instance, whereas in a federated model they’d be more independent.
A centralized implementation is much simpler than a decentralized one, making it easier to guarantee performance and stability if you don’t do it. That might explain why they don’t want it.
They do ask for donations in the app from time to time.
Im not sure I can afford that
I’ve never heard of this before
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“Because I don’t want PayPal doing the same”
Honestly they’re both annoying because they take a fee on top of the credit card company fee. Just cut out the middleman and use the credit card option.
Get yourself a password manager. You’ll always have your PayPal password at hand.
I’ve been liking bitwarden so far. Works well, seems properly encrypted, no big scandals, etc. But of course anyone reading this should compare a few offers first.
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I have a simple git repo on my nas for sync because I don’t really trust putting passwords on github either. Using a git repo also allows you to easily revert changes which is really nice. I found this guide helpful.
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WhatsApp’s initial monetization model was pretty good. Free for the first year, $1/year after that. With 400 million users, that’s a lot of money.
Signal has 50 million, but could cover their costs for $5/year per user, I’m sure, assuming not all users would pay.
If the dollar fee of Whatsapp teaches us anything is that any tax you put on your app hinders adoption.
Whatsapp intended to do that but ended up scrapping the tax for various reasons. One of them was to keep the existing user base (they have existing customers lifetime use for free when they brought out the $1 idea). Another was the fact that in some populous regions of the world credit cards weren’t common (like India) and they’d rather have lots of users there.
Bottom line, the $1 Whatsapp is even more elusive than the WinRar license and I’ve never personally heard of anybody who ever paid it.
My dad paid for it for himself, for me and for my mother, this made a lot of sense bc in Spain, in the pre-messaging app era, sms were like 5-20cents each in most tariffs.
It was getting to the point where it wasn’t uncommon for an average joe to just ask their friend who’s using whatsapp how to pay for it so he can have it too(many ppl had never bought anything online so they needed help)
However things are different now, there are tons of free messaging app alternatives out there, ppl would rather change to another free one.
As much as I would hate a “premium tier” for signal. That sounds like the best approach. Charge $5 a year for features that make sense if you are a signal power user, though that can get dicey fast on what those premium features are
Basically the gamification and moneyfication that for example discord uses which are basically gimmicks for dumb things like animated avatars or special stickers and we clearly know there are a bunch of people that actually fall for it and give money to feel superior for having those things.
Sort of, though I’d be hesitant to say “actually fall for it” in the case of Signal considering it’s a non profit. They’ve worked really hard to solidify chat privacy, and this is more like “if you use signal a lot, and want some features that in no way impact the service but might be something you’re interested in, perhaps you’d donate?”
It’s either that or beg for donations with banners Wikipedia style. They’ve laid out their costs here pretty well. It’s expensive. I mean even your point of “feeling superior,” many who champion privacy are asking people to switch to signal to chat with them because they won’t use other non-secure chat apps, so I see nothing wrong with a “donor” indicator that can be added to their profile or something.
Or have something similar to Cosmetics or better bandwidth (like tgram does)
They had 40 million users in 2021, so a dollar a year would cover the costs.
Can we really call a business nonprofit if they pay their CEO 5.7 million a year? Over 10% of operating costs going to one employee? That’s fucking insaneEdit - incorrect information
Where’s that number from? I see her as a little under $200k.
The most secure and privacy respecting chat app doesn’t develop and run itself.
CISO and developers in that field earn into the millions, and Signal is competing with the top dogs here (MANGA). There pay is ridiculously modest.
They are paying their CEO $0. Brian Acton, previously founder of WhatsApp, the guy who initially bankrolled the whole non-profit by a $50 million, 50 year, non-secured, 0% interst loan, later giving even more.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Foundation#History
They pay some other C levels 400-600k. Source: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840 (compensation section)
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Yeah I have to ask for a credible source on that one.
They say 19 mil a year on 50 people - that’s like 380k per person for a non for profit… That number seems a little high surely?
Even if this were accurate, what they pay a CEO is a function of the “CEO Marketplace”, i.e. what other companies are paying CEOs, as those are the companies they’re competing against to get talent.
You know what, that’s fair.
I saw a lot of discussion in the comments about their workers pay, but honestly, they make a great product. Wouldn’t wanna be counting pennies in someone elses pockets. I donated a one time 25 bucks, I hope they will continue to ask for donations whenever they are in dire need of server running money.
Just over a dollar a user doesn’t sound that bad.
I suspect if they run short of money to run it, they’d add some Discord style features. Better quality voice and video sounds like an easy one to get users of it to pony up for.
Although again, I’d prefer a federated alternative. We shouldn’t be hanging large portions of infrastructure on a handful of companies that at any point can pull the rug.
Someone mentioned above but we have that in Matrix. A great federated messaging service.
