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
We need a lemmy version of signal
That’s Matrix. End to end encrypted, decentralized, and open source.
Bridging opens it up to other services as well, like how Pidgin/Adium/Gaim used to work.
No joke, I’d be way more willing to pay for stuff if business were open about their expenses.
I’m glad that Signal choose to be transparent about its spending instead of hiding it from obscurity.
Hiding from obscurity? 🤔
Removed by mod
ESL. Bots don’t make that kind of mistake.
I find it amusing they don’t accept donations via their own cryptocurrency 🫠
Lol
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m dead serious wtf is signal? It’s like texting but all texting apps just go through it? Or something?