Signal’s operating costs: around $40 million this year
- $14 million a year in infrastructure costs
- $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
- $19 million a year or so out of Signal’s budget pays for its staff. Signal now employs about 50 people
Staff budget seem crazy high with about 50 people. That's an average of $31.666 per month per employee.
In all likelihood a lot of that goes to the top 5 of those 50. If I’m wrong… good.
These guys are way smarter than me and have clearly thought about this, but 15% of your operating costs seems wildly high for verifying phone numbers.
Still might be high, but if that's budget #s, the employee pay is much lower after taking into about related overhead.
Like HanDman said, hopefully it's not all going to the top handful.
6 million annually? could they not find some other means to verify or remove the requirement altogether - insanity
AWS ain’t cheap
It's cheap until you're successful, and they'll take all your money.
they run off of aws?!?!
I cant help but think that federation would not only help the security aspect of signal but also the cost of running it???
I really like Jami, which is distributed and uses p2p. Session is also quite cool.
Now to get all our lazy family and friends to stop supporting ad terrorists and support something worthwhile for once. Life is exhausting
How does Signal make money? How is it so well funded?
So if it costs $50mil/year with an active Userbase of 40 mil it would come down to 1,25/ user/year. I would love a very transparent detailed donation page that breaks down those cost and shows how many people donate etc. The badge thing is a first step, but honestly 5/month doesn't make it very attractive. I did that once but don't feel the need to do it again. It should be more visible to become a conversation starter. But that would need a better and more informative donation page.
And I get that not everybody would/will pay but I'd be willing to pay 10-20€/year which should cover the costs for 10-15 people... So we would need ~12% of the userbase to do the same... Is my arithmetic right or is there an error in my thought?
Does anybody know if larger yearly (10-20€) donations are preferred to smaller (1-2€) per month. I remember that in the past due to administrative cost fewer but larger donations were preferred by charities. But maybe that isn't the case anymore due to lower costs of digital payments?!