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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

#61

Post by tofuahdude »

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.

Why is it that SMS is so damn expensive? (or more specifically, what is it about Twilio et al's businesses that makes them cost so much?)

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#62

Post by winterismute »

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.

Isn't it 380k per person in average? Seems like in-line with FAANG salaries in major US cities.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#63

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#64

Post by foundart »

jph wrote: post #21

Signal can be better, IMHO, by separating from phone number requirements. In other words, let users have secure random ids, rather than forcing each user to hand over their phone number for phone company verification. It turns out the budget shows the phone number registration problem: the costs to deal with phone number verification seem to be $6MM, which seems to be 10% of the entire budget. If Signal staff are rea…

How would it be better? Is there anything beyond not having to provide a phone number?

How would it be worse?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#65

Post by zamalek »

jph wrote: post #21

Signal can be better, IMHO, by separating from phone number requirements. In other words, let users have secure random ids, rather than forcing each user to hand over their phone number for phone company verification. It turns out the budget shows the phone number registration problem: the costs to deal with phone number verification seem to be $6MM, which seems to be 10% of the entire budget. If Signal staff are rea…

The phone number requirement is why WhatsApp won the space over in the first place. There were loads of username+password-based services before it, but none reached the market it did. Why? An incredibly wide user funnel, singing up is frictionless.

You might understand that it's a bad idea, but that makes you an outlier.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#66

Post by datpiff »

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?

Costs for staff are not just salaries. It's also pensions, taxes, benefits, the offices, software licenses and all the other stuff. I've often heard 50% of total cost going to salary, but it varies.

Still does seem high though.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#67

Post by hotnfresh »

mi_lk wrote: post #41
baby wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wonder why it’s so expensive to run. I always hear things about scaling but I used to run a top 500 alexia website and it was just a php app running on a mutualized offer for $5/month. Lots of manual caching though but still. My wild guess is that either the stack is not really optimal (last I heard it was java) or they do other costly things at scale (sgx?)

> the stack is not really optimal (last I heard it was java) how's java relevant here?

Java in theory and in synthetic benchmarks: damn near as lean and mean as C.

Every actual Java project: “oh, did you want that memory and those cycles for something else? Yeah, sorry, I need them all. Why no, I’m not actually doing anything right now, why do you ask?”

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#68

Post by j45 »

tofuahdude wrote: post #61
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.

Why is it that SMS is so damn expensive? (or more specifically, what is it about Twilio et al's businesses that makes them cost so much?)

Nothing just profit and existing system access costs set by the incumbents.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#70

Post by datpiff »

jedberg wrote: post #52
sky_rw wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is their total cost, not the salary paid.
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