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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

#141

Post by lxgr »

nvrmnd wrote: post #80

I donate to signal, and use it frequently. But I would much prefer for the app to simply charge users rather than beg for donations. Even better would be to charge users in a way that reflects the costs. For instance, maybe verifying a new number over SMS should cost $0.10 if that's going to make up 14% of the operating costs. Begging for donations to subsidize excessive use by other users just doesn't seem sustainab…

How are you going to charge users $0.10? Micropayments is a huge unsolved problem.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#142

Post by oconnore »

cl3misch wrote: post #94
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…

A bit handwavy, but allowing sign-up without a phone number could massively increase bot/spam traffic and ultimately increase hosting costs for Signal.

The deal could just be: no phone number, but you have to pay $x/year (I guess this doesn't work with 501c3?)

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#143

Post by myself248 »

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.

What's it cost to be an SS7 peer for a year? Could they spin up their own "phone company" for the purpose of delivering SMS verification and nothing else, cheaper than they're paying someone else's markup?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#144

Post by a_vanderbilt »

asylteltine wrote: post #103
exabrial wrote: post #51

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 alon…

They need to dump sms entirely. Use on device private keys. If users mess it up, it’s on them. People need to get educated about how to manage private keys.

Then few will use it and Signal will die. There is this gap between the ideals of the technically-minded and the reality that users live in. They tried to dump SMS - and people responded by not using alternatives. The entire sales pitch of Signal is that it is easy and unobtrusive.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#145

Post by binary132 »

oconnore wrote: post #142
cl3misch wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit handwavy, but allowing sign-up without a phone number could massively increase bot/spam traffic and ultimately increase hosting costs for Signal.

The deal could just be: no phone number, but you have to pay $x/year (I guess this doesn't work with 501c3?)

I'd jump on that so fast.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#146

Post by BobaFloutist »

zamalek wrote: post #65
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.

Requiring a phone number also seems like a decent way increase friction for automated account creation - obviously it can be overcome, but it probably reduces automated account creation by a few orders of magnitudes, which I would imagine reduces the amount of botting/phishing/ban evasion, which could all add up to be pretty expensive to an org.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#148

Post by cmiles74 »

munk-a wrote: post #102
lxgr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 suspec…

To clarify - iMessage does not use SMS if you're going from Apple to Apple device and both devices have data/wifi available. iMessage refuses to support messaging to Android clients and defaults to SMS for these messages. I've got an Android phone so all iMessage transmissions come across as SMS (or MMS).

My phone runs Android, I'm pretty much forced to use SMS in order to communicate with anyone who uses an iPhone and that's most of my family. While it can be argued that iMessage provides a good enough experience on an iPhone for most people, I have wondered if they are the one thing keeping SMS alive.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#149

Post by yieldcrv »

exabrial wrote: post #51

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 alon…

costs for a nonprofit are the same as costs for a forprofit

there’s just a bunch of nonprofit employees or personnel that play on the pauper perception because its convenient, but “nonprofit” and no money is not correlated to anything

so if those employee costs were excessive for any organization, saying non profit doesn’t make them more or less excessive

I think tech talent is undervalued and should at least compete directly with FAANG, for many organizations this is not possible, for organizations with other liquid assets they create (like Signal) it is possible. All employment hasnt risen with cost of living, I’m not familiar with other sectors.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#150

Post by collaborative »

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…

Typical HN comment saying I will pay $ for xyz feature (which everyone, including the poster, knows to be BS)
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