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.
to do with a 1mb text file
God you must be like my wife and write fucking novels as text messages.
Lol I think they probably mean like an entire chat history (or page of one), but yeah that’s pretty big.
If you are curious, you should give XMPP a shot, it’s equivalent to Signal in terms of encryption, but anyone can host their own. Signal is ideologically opposed to anyone but themselves being in control of your account, and because of that I don’t want to trust them.
And now here I am, nostalgic for the good old days of having one chat app that could connect you to everyone over XMPP/jabber.
Indeed. Xmpp is lost as a general purpose chat app for everyone. I have many issues with matrix but it’s the best chance we have, particularly with bridges.
Neither XMPP nor Matrix will ever become “the next WhatsApp”: the current internet has seen too much consolidation for the tech majors to permit it (and open and federated protocols can’t compete, do not have the marketing budget nor the platforms to promote their software, but I salute the EU’s Market Act attempt to shake-up the status quo).
But that doesn’t really matter IMO. What (I believe) is important in the grand scheme of things is that such protocols remain alive, maintained and secure, so that:
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small-scale instances can flourish and contribute to a more resilient/efficient internet (think of family-/district-level providers ; this is the kind of service I personally offer: family members and friends at large appreciate that the messages and data that we exchange aren’t shared over some cloud or facebook server for no good reason)
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IM identities can persist over time: if you are a business or an individual, you may want to look into having a stable/lasting contact address, that will survive the inevitable collapse of facebook/whatsapp/instagram/… If you are old enough, your current email address probably existed before facebook. Why not your IM address?
And yes, I hear you, this is rather niche, but what got me there (and on XMPP in particular) is having been long-enough on the internet to become tired of the never-ending cycle of migrations from service to service. More and more people will have a similar experience as time goes, so this niche will only grow :)
I assessed XMPP vs Matrix about 8 years ago, and strikingly, the basis on which it didn’t make the cut still applies today. Here’s what I responded to a sibling post: https://programming.dev/comment/5408356
In short, Matrix dug themselves into a complexity pit with an inadequate protocol, survived for a while on venture capital money (upscaling servers and marketing at all cost), all of it dried up, and now they are in financial trouble. Matrix won’t disappear overnight, but is definitely losing the means to run the managed instances and the client/server ecosystem.
It’s difficult to maintain privacy in a P2P environment. In naive implementations, your IP address will be visible to all the peers you connect to. This is the case in e.g. BitTorrent.
Signal has this issue with video/voice calls as well; by default they operate on a P2P basis for performance reasons, and they expose your IP address to the second party. Signal has an option in the settings to relay voice/video calls through their servers specifically to mitigate this.
There are some workarounds for anonymizing P2P, like routing through Tor or I2P. Tor, however, has known exploits and is probably not suitable if you need to hide your activity from advanced adversaries like world governments (e.g. political dissidents, journalists, etc.)
I2P sounds interesting but I’m not deeply familiar with it. I understand that I2P clients also act as relay nodes, which puts an additional bandwidth burden on users. I’m not sure if I2P is more resilient against government-level attacks than Tor. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who is more familiar with the protocol.
If you’re using it for personal correspondence with people you know and trust, that’s probably fine. However, a secure and private communications platform should support more extreme use cases as well.
If you’re a journalist, for example, you might need to communicate with people you do not know or trust. You could realistically be talking to someone who wants to kill you, or who is being monitored by people who want to kill you, particularly if you are covering high-profile political issues or working with whistleblowers (or are yourself a whistleblower). Even revealing information as broad as what city you’re in (which would be revealed by your IP address) could be a risk to your physical safety.
Even though I do not personally face such high-level threats in my life, I feel better using services that allow for the possibility. Privacy is a habit, and who knows what tomorrow might bring?
I‘m not an expert on this topic, so someone correct me if I’m wrong. Signal is only storing stuff temporarily to pass it on, so I’m assuming you’d have the exact same costs even if it weren’t centralized. Maybe even more as it’s probably cheaper to have it managed in one place. I’m assuming all this would do is distribute the cost, but otherwise be the same?
You’re not wrong. Federation would have higher costs but distributed over more people. Even with pure P2P a-la BitTorrent things might not be significantly cheaper because you’d likely still need to host authentication centrally or federally. You’d only eliminate the message bandwidth costs.
The thing is, we already have a way to distribute the costs - people subscribe to support Signal. Some pay more, others less. Whether I run a node that serves 100 people or subscribe for $10/month, it’s somewhat equivalent. So the practical takeaway should be - if you want for Signal to keep signalling - subscribe if you can afford it.
The difference is that there’s enough unused capacity on your personal device to handle all the traffic any typical user needs to handle in a day many times over, for simple messaging. Likely, that load is so little it won’t even affect your battery life.
Wouldn’t you still need a server in between to temporarily store the messages if the other person isn’t available?
Funnily enough their biggest expense (sending SMS during registration) is making the accounts less private.
I imagine not paying for it and being overloaded with spam bots would be more expensive (otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it this way!)
Anonymity is a form of privacy. While for most people it’s not necessary to be anonymous to have privacy, it’s essential in some cases, like whistleblowers or people living under dictatorships (or even in some democracies where governments keeps trying to get their paws on all metadata).
They could save a lot on infrastructure costs if they decentralised their network and stopped using phone numbers as unique identifiers.
I’m all for decentralised networks, but they do have their flaws. I use Matrix every day, and there are a lot of times the keys need to be resent, messages don’t get sent or deleted on shaky internet, etc. Issues like this make it seem broken to normies. Signal Just Works™️
Signal Just Works™️
Until you drop your phone in the swimming pool, and every message/photo you’ve ever received is just… gone. Forever.
Sorry but I don’t buy any claim that Signal “just works”. It’s pretty clear they care about security more than anything else even when that means making decisions that are user hostile. And that’s fine - if you feel like you need that level of security I’m glad Signal exists. But it doesn’t really align with the general public and Signal is never going to be a mass market messaging service unless something changes (Signal or the general public).
What’s weird to me is an app that excludes itself from phone backups considers SMS a valid form of authentication when a user links a device to a phone number - especially when you can necessarily link a device to a number that is already tied to someone else’s device. Like how is that ever going to be secure? Spoiler: it’s not. It’d make a lot more sense to me if users simply crated a username and shared it with other people instead of a phone number… and if they forget their password… come up with new username.
Signal provides a backup option. The auto backup for SMS on android is provided by google and likely uses google drive. I don’t know for certain but I would guess the encryption options and security of that route would be impossible to guarantee and the public backlash of signal users knowing their data was being sent to Google’s servers would be massive.
I’ve setup my signal backups to a local folder on my phone. I then have SyncThing running on my phone and home computer so it automatically gets sent once it’s created.
Quote from the blog post:
Registration Fees
Signal incurs expenses when people download Signal and sign up for an account, or when they re-register on a new device. We use third-party services to send a registration code via SMS or voice call in order to verify that the person in possession of a given phone number actually intended to sign up for a Signal account. This is a critical step in helping to prevent spam accounts from signing up for the service and rendering it completely unusable—a non-trivial problem for any popular messaging app.
SMS verification is expensive.
Obviously, running the infrastructure to support the entire user base is also expensive. Decentralized protocols like Matrix sidestep this problem by allowing anyone to host their own infrastructure to use the network. Even if the largest Matrix server shuts down, the network will live on, and people can migrate to another server or host their own. This distributes the costs and allows for different business models to support those costs – commercial, non-profit, cooperative, whatever. Corporations can (and do) host their own Matrix servers for their employees, for instance. I wouldn’t be surprised to see universities do the same, like they frequently do with email.
November 9th, the verge: Signal tests usernames so you can avoid sharing your phone number
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.
When running a business, you need to budget 3x salary for actual TCO of a staff member:
1x covers their direct salary 2x covers retirement fund, electricity, office space, and infrastructure items unlike server and laptops for corporate use etc.
The 3x multiplier is for when you’re a services company, and that represents a possibly profit margin.
So for signal, your $380k becomes $190k which in my experience is average for a US tech sw dev at a mid to early senior level.
I donate to signal monthly and I have no problems with the costs they’re posting. I work in SV tech and I’ve seen 20x worse numbers.
I’m extremely curious where you get those numbers from, I operate businesses and that doesn’t pass the sniff test.
I’ve used the 3x multiplier for staff planning at services companies since the early 2000s.
Perhaps there are regional differences, but they’ve rung true for planning billable rates of return at every services company I’ve worked at in the last 20 years here in AU.
I realise that the services aspect isn’t relevant, but having the sum of indirect staff costs equivalent to staff salary cost when office space is involved isn’t a massive stretch in my experience. (Indirect costs would include office rent, utilities, infrastructure and a share of shared functions such as IT, HR, facilities etc…)
3x is too much tbh. It’s more like 2x in total, at least going by european points of view - I don’t know what would make the US more expensive though with even less welfare. And office space in these days is a diminishing cost of course with all the hybrid/remote options. Laptops cost is pretty negligible. I think Signal does have a lot of hosting costs though.
As an American dev, you should check out other silicon valley salaries. After hearing what some folks there make 190k doesn’t make me bat an eye.
True, but Signal is choosing to hire such people. There’s talent all over the world and all over the US. There’s absolutely no need to only hire people from one highly expensive region.
I don’t care if employees are well paid. I do care that Signal takes 50 employees to operate. What are they all doing? This is a genuine question
You did not read the article, did you?
This is a lot of work, and we do it with a small and mighty team. In total, around 50 full-time employees currently work on Signal, a number that is shockingly small by industry standards. For example, LINE Corporation, the developers of the LINE messaging app popular in Japan, has around 3,100 employees, while the division of Kakao Corp that develops KakaoTalk, a messaging app popular in Korea, has around 4,000 employees. Employee counts at bigger corporations like Malus, Meta, and Google’s parent company (Alphabet) are much, much higher.
I can’t speak for LINE - But Kakao does a heck of a lot more than messaging; it’s one of the top companies to work for and the defacto app of Korea. It’s used for taxis, webtoons, payments, music streaming, banking, social media, OAuth, etc (and that’s on top of all its failed ventures no one uses). So yeah, it makes sense to have a lot more employees. Getting into Kakao is like getting into Google or Apple in the West.
It also doesn’t explain why Signal has 50. Signal is open source, but openly hostile to forks which throttles its development. So I wonder, what are those 50 employees doing? I genuinely would like to see a breakdown
You didn’t read their question, did you? Because your quote does not answer it.
Worth mentioning, as someone has for Kakao below, the LINE app has a magnitude or two or three more features than Signal. Beyond chat, the app handles payments including retail via QR, effectively has Instagram and TikTok built in, has an entire news section, and much more.
Heck, LINE the company even has permanent and pop-up merchandise stores in downtown Tokyo (Harajuku) and their own MVNO mobile carrier called LINE Mobile.
Now that said, I loathe LINE, the app. The UX is poor and the app is bloated behind belief. Only use it effectively out of necessity as someone living in Japan. The only alternative communications channel even remotely close in usage is probably Instagram chat.
When Whatsapp was sold to Facebook in 2014, they had 55 employees. Considering the app had considerably less features and did not focus so heavily on encryption and privacy, Signal can be considered even leaner than Whatsapp.
Now, for the actual breakdown, they have at least the following technical teams: desktop, android, iOS, server, calls (ringrtc), core (libsignal). If we assume a team has usually 5 people (manager, Sr SWE, Jr SWE, QA, maybe PM), that’s already 30 people. On top of that, they have an in house support team (don’t know the size but I wouldn’t be surprised if they have 10ppl on the payroll considering the number of signal users) and management (CEO, CTO, CSO, VP), which will quickly add up to around 50.
That is indeed a lot. They must have most of these in Silicon Valley.
However it is their choice to do so. They don’t have to be in the most expensive place in the world for developers.
I prefer sponsoring matrix though as it’s really open. Signal is just a slightly nicer walled garden. Also, Matrix doesn’t need to be linked to my mobile number which is a godsend because I tend to change those once in a while and it’s a real nightmare bringing all whatsapp contacts over.
Is it just me or is $19 million per year for 50 full-time employees insane?
Even for US salary standards.
Not necessarily.
Signal has people who are experts in their field. They engineer solutions that don’t exist anywhere else in the market to ensure they have as little information on you as possible while keeping you secure [0]. This in turn means high compensation + benefits. You don’t want to be paying your key developers peanuts as that makes them liable to taking bribes from adversaries to “oops” a security vulnerability in the service. In addition, the higher compensation is a great way to mitigate losing talent to private organizations who can afford it.
[0] Signal has engineered the following technologies that all work to ensure your privacy and security:
At least the private contact discovery is not very private:
The client calculates the truncated SHA256 hash of each phone number in the device’s address book.
The client transmits those truncated hashes to the service.
Phone numbers are so not-sparse that there even was a game to text your “number neighbor”. I can probably build a pretty effective rainbow table for this with my current hardware.
You’re right, but security and privacy is about layers, not always 100% effective mitigations, especially not when the mitigation is a function (contact discovery) that requires a private list (your contacts) be compared against another one. For anyone where this is an actual security risk, they don’t have to to share their contacts. They will not know which of their friends/family are on Signal, but they can still use the service.
This feature does protect users in that any legal court order for Signal to present who is friends with who (as almost every other messaging provider has actual access to your list of contacts) is not possible. They’ve been subpoenaed multiple times[0] and all they can show is when an account was created and the last day (not time) a client pinged their servers.
Lastly, I’m not sure if this is even a feature or not but it wouldn’t be too difficult to introduce rate-limiting to mitigate this issue even more. As an example, its very unlikely that most people have thousands (or even tens of thousands) of people in their contacts. Assuming we go just a step beyond the 99th percentile, you can effectively block anyone as soon as they start trying to crawl the entire phone number address space, preventing the issue you’re describing.
For the current distribution I quote from the linked source :
Current Infrastructure Costs (as of November 2023): Approximately $14 million dollars per year.
- Storage: $1.3 million dollars per year.
- Servers: $2.9 million dollars per year.
- Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year.
- Total Bandwidth: $2.8 million dollars per year.
- Additional Services: $700,000 dollars per year.
Yes, but I was talking about the salary part, which is separate from the costs you mentioned.
It’s 19 million just for people.
Also from the source:
To sustain our ongoing development efforts, about half of Signal’s overall operating budget goes towards recruiting, compensating, and retaining the people who build and care for Signal. When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.
Not at all. That’s $380K per person if everyone is making the same. Engineers with a few years of experience at Meta make $400K+.
Don’t forget the employer taxes, insurance, recruitment costs and so on. It wouldn’t surprise me if the employees are earning on average half that.
