- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
Signalâs president reveals the cost of running the privacy-preserving platformânot 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 offâand itâs not cheap. For the first time, the Signal Foundation that runs the app has published a full breakdown of Signalâs operating costs: around $40 million this year, projected to hit $50 million by 2025.
Signalâs president, Meredith Whittaker, says her decision to publish the detailed cost numbers in a blog post for the first timeâgoing well beyond the IRS disclosures legally required of nonprofitsâwas 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 usersâ data or, she argues, by locking users into networks that very often operate with that same corporate surveillance business model.
âBy 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,â Whittaker tells WIRED. Running a service like Signalâor WhatsApp or Gmail or Telegramâis, she says, âsurprisingly expensive. You may not know that, and thereâs a good reason you donât know that, and itâs because itâs not something that companies who pay those expenses via surveillance want you to know.â
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 accountsâ 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 Signalâs 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. âPeople didnât take vacations,â Whittaker says. âPeople didnât get on planes because they didnât want to be offline if there was an outage or something.â While that skeleton-crew era is overâWhittaker says it wasnât sustainable for those few overworked staffersâshe 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
As much as I would hate a âpremium tierâ 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 Iâd be hesitant to say âactually fall for itâ in the case of Signal considering itâs a non profit. Theyâve worked really hard to solidify chat privacy, and this is more like âif you use signal a lot, and want some features that in no way impact the service but might be something youâre interested in, perhaps youâd donate?â
Itâs either that or beg for donations with banners Wikipedia style. Theyâve laid out their costs here pretty well. Itâs expensive. I mean even your point of âfeeling superior,â many who champion privacy are asking people to switch to signal to chat with them because they wonât use other non-secure chat apps, so I see nothing wrong with a âdonorâ indicator that can be added to their profile or something.
Or have something similar to Cosmetics or better bandwidth (like tgram does)