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.
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.
AWS ain’t cheap
I cant help but think that federation would not only help the security aspect of signal but also the cost of running it???
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?!
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?
NSA
