11 mo. ago • 100%

Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

signal.org Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

Signal is the world’s most widely used truly private messaging app, and our cryptographic technologies provide extra layers of privacy beyond the Signal app itself. Since launching in 2013, the Signal Protocol—our end-to-end encryption technology—has become the de facto standard for private commu...

We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.

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Technology @lemmy.world Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

Hacker News @derp.foo Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

111 comments

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66
Funnily enough their biggest expense (sending SMS during registration) is making the accounts less private.

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They could save a lot on infrastructure costs if they decentralised their network and stopped using phone numbers as unique identifiers.

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In total, around 50 full-time employees currently work on Signal

[...]

When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.

That's 380k/employee on average. Even if half of that went to taxes and other expenses, on average they're paying their employees around 190k/year.

Bro, as a European dev, that's triple my salary! They could possibly double or triple their workforce if they hired from outside of the US.

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Is it just me or is $19 million per year for 50 full-time employees insane?

Even for US salary standards.

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Would be interesting to see how this compares to XMPP or Matrix. Obviously the development costs something for each of those, but the hosting costs are spread out across each of those hosting an instance.

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They should do a charity stream event or something. Do Q&A stuff, get interest of more people, and raise money?

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Are decentralised apps like element much less expensive ?

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SimpleX Chat

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