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.
Are decentralised apps like element much less expensive ?
The costs are distributed as there is not one single instance. Just like with Lemmy.
Although there is one huge instance on matrix (matrix.org), a bit like lemmy.ml here. But it doesn’t have to be like that, they can close signups or discourage them similar to the way lemmy.ml is doing that now.
Element has the same costs as Signal. So far, Element has been lucky in being able to raise money by selling support contracts to governments or companies using Matrix, but even that isn’t enough, which is why Element has been raising money for the Matrix Foundation for almost a year now (with little success).
No but they do have commercial clients, even some government departments.
They’re also trying to sell Element One directly to end users which involved a few bridges like connection to whatsapp, signal and telegram. Not a bad deal for 5 bucks a month IMO, though I run mine myself because I want to.
There’s also beeper which sells a service with (a lot) more bridges than Element One but costs twice the price. Their company sponsors most of the bridge development as they employ the main bridge developer.
The load distributes across more shoulders automatically.
If you only host a server for yourself and 10 friends it costs next to nothing, if you have a big operation it can get just as expensive, it depends on what you are willing to do.
With centralized systems there is no choice but for the one centralized host to host everything.
SimpleX Chat
They should do a charity stream event or something. Do Q&A stuff, get interest of more people, and raise money?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…)
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
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.
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.
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.
You didn’t read their question, did you? Because your quote does not answer it.
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
They could save a lot on infrastructure costs if they decentralised their network and stopped using phone numbers as unique identifiers.
November 9th, the verge: Signal tests usernames so you can avoid sharing your phone number
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.
