- 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
You can donate via crypto on their website
This isnât viable.
I tried to buy crypto to support some sailors, but⊠The fees buying that shit are insane. I didnât want to trade, gamble or by a crypto bro, just exchange some USD to bitcoin, was directed to coinbase as they are reputable, apparently and wonât steal my shit, but their fees are insane. Trading 100 USD was like 19.95 $ in fees. Fuck that shit.
Is there a cheaper / better yet still safe way to get crypto?
Using crypto isnât for everyone, I just thought they might not know. Itâs much easier when youâre âin itâ.
Bitcoin is generally considered expensive. Bitcoin cash would be the way to go imo, but they accept all sorts that are way less expensive.
Personally I would reccomend p2p methods like bisq and agoradesk. But then you incure exchange fees anyway as you would be more likely buying monero (lower fees and more private), which their âpartnerâ doesnât accept.
Either way, still cheaper that you described
I agree this is mostly for people already owning crypto.
Note that not all crypto are created equal, bitcoin is probably the one with the highest fees.
The good news is that a lot of developpers accept cryptocurrency donations (often xmr in addition to btc I noticed). So you can help a lot of organisations that donât want to pay and do legal paperwork to accept fiat.