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.
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.
It's all explained in the document, basically the telecom companies realized that people do not send SMS anymore and that the value of them lies now on the companies that need to send you verification texts and other automated messages, as a consequence, they inflated the cost of those to extract as much money as they can. The document also describes fraudsters that register numbers en masse to drive SMS traffic on a particular network and then make money of the fees.
6 million annually? could they not find some other means to verify or remove the requirement altogether - insanity
In all likelihood a lot of that goes to the top 5 of those 50. If I’m wrong… good.
You can see compensation here https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840
Adding up the 7 listed employees there is about $3.5 million, leaving $15.5 million for the remaining 47 employees, giving an average of $360,000 a year per employee. Damn good wage.
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.
AWS ain’t cheap
It's cheap until you're successful, and they'll take all your money.
they run off of aws?!?!
Now to get all our lazy family and friends to stop supporting ad terrorists and support something worthwhile for once. Life is exhausting
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?!
How does Signal make money? How is it so well funded?
One of the lesser known, possibly reformed(?), Facebook billionaires gave them a bunch of money several years ago, and they've been trying to bootstrap that into long term sustainability via donations from regular people.
Edit: See duplexsystem's comment below for a better summary.
Brian Acton, the creator of WhatsApp, co-founded Signal and loaned them a shit ton of money. "$105,000,400, due to be repaid on February 28, 2068. The loan is unsecured and carries nil interest." He's still Executive Chairman.
Good guy
i mean, it is a loan. still, cool of them to do. no fucking clue how theyll ever pay it off
Its unsecured with nil interest. I doubt they're expected to pay it off.
unsecured?
NSA
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.