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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

signal.org

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#51

Post by exabrial »

Some of these things raise an eyebrow and I'd like them further broken down (but in the mean time, I'm still donating):

* $19 million for 50 staff

  - That's $338k/head on average. At face value for a nonprofit, I'd like these costs broke down as this seems excessive. There is far cheaper IT labor available outside SV.
* 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

  - I'd drop these features if possible, or give them to donors.
* Storage: $1.3m, Servers: $2.9m

  - I was actually expecting this to be far higher

  - Long term storage should probably be donor-only

  - Servers could likely be optimized by going hybrid cloud with colocation and owning own hardware, but again, was surprised how "little" they're spending on this.
* Sms registration fees: $6m

  - Stop contributing and supporting the "Your phone number is your identity" problem.

  - Move towards helping educating society and establishing a set of encryption keys as their long term identity
It's easy to criticize from the bleachers. Still thankful for the app and I'll continue to donate.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#52

Post by jedberg »

sky_rw wrote: post #43
vjk800 wrote: post #29

> 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. What? I know silicon valley salaries are a thing, but absolutely everywhere else in the world this would be insane. Maybe change the headquarters to somewhere cheaper?

I keep re-reading this section of their blog post trying to figure out what I'm missing here. $2.6 million full load per employee on avg? Is this heavily weighted to a few executives? Can somebody explain this to me? Edit: I'm stupid and did the math backwards.

You mathed backwards. It's $380K per person fully loaded. Which is pretty inline with decent tech salary these days.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#53

Post by dangoor »

sky_rw wrote: post #43
vjk800 wrote: post #29

> 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. What? I know silicon valley salaries are a thing, but absolutely everywhere else in the world this would be insane. Maybe change the headquarters to somewhere cheaper?

I keep re-reading this section of their blog post trying to figure out what I'm missing here. $2.6 million full load per employee on avg? Is this heavily weighted to a few executives? Can somebody explain this to me? Edit: I'm stupid and did the math backwards.

I think your math is off? $19M/50 people = $380,000?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#55

Post by codemac »

> As a small nonprofit organization, we cannot afford to purchase all of the physical computers that are necessary to support everyone who relies on Signal while also placing them in independent data centers around the world.

This is really the crux of the problem. ~$3M of servers per year is more than enough to start purchasing hardware, I wish there were easier ways for people like me to participate and help Signal on the cheap.

As someone who participated in the builds they complain about being expensive (and ignoring their , I don't think it's a function of centralization or "troubling" as much as it is practical. Meta, Google, etc all have many billions they could be saving if they could figure out how to make it cheaper too.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#57

Post by dale_glass »

sky_rw wrote: post #43
vjk800 wrote: post #29

> 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. What? I know silicon valley salaries are a thing, but absolutely everywhere else in the world this would be insane. Maybe change the headquarters to somewhere cheaper?

I keep re-reading this section of their blog post trying to figure out what I'm missing here. $2.6 million full load per employee on avg? Is this heavily weighted to a few executives? Can somebody explain this to me? Edit: I'm stupid and did the math backwards.

You're doing that division backwards.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#58

Post by kyawzazaw »

ActorNightly wrote: post #49

Has anyone tried setting up their own Signal server? Be cool to do this, and then give all your friends the ip for truly private messaging. https://github.com/signalapp Seems like all their stuff is open source.

unlikely the people i want to talk will bother setting this up

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#59

Post by lxgr »

munk-a wrote: post #33
Dunedan wrote: post #2

> 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. Signal pays more for delivering verification SMS during sign-up, than for all other infrastructure (except traffic) combined. Wow, that sounds excessive.

SMS rates are absolutely bonkers considering the technical way they're transmitted. The US is an outlier in SMS rates actually being reasonable (usually unlimited or close to) for consumers - but for the rest of the world the insane mark up on that communication method has mostly obsoleted it... That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use…

> for the rest of the world the insane mark up on that communication method has mostly obsoleted it...

For P2P communication. SMS is alive and well for B2C messaging, most importantly for 2FA OTP delivery, but also as a first line of defense against spam/bot account creation.

It's not a good solution to either problem, but it's slightly better than nothing (which apparently makes it good enough for many), so I suspect we're stuck with it for now.

> That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use iMessage.

iMessage is not SMS, though. It just uses phone numbers as identifiers, but so do many other popular over-the-top messengers, including the most popular one globally.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#60

Post by Buttons840 »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #23

If you really wanted to talk to somebody in a "non-decryptable" fashion, could you set up like a channel that encrypts itself with a ton of different encryption methods, keys, etc. (encrypted payloads inside each other) Signal encryption is its main feature (I think) and how easy it makes it (abstracts handling key transfer and all that), I'm just trying to think through... if I wanted nobody to read what I was sayin…

It's a bit off topic, but I've wondered the same.

We could stack a hundred layers of encryption algorithms, and if just one of them works, then the whole stack is secure.

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