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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

#151

Post by zimpenfish »

vore wrote: post #123
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…

- 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. You get what you pay for, though. $338k/year seems like a reasonable salary for people working on something as privacy critical as Signal – just because you're working for a nonprofit doesn't mean you have to work for less competitive wages.

> $338k/year seems like a reasonable salary for people

That $19M/year was total employee costs which, as best I understand these things, can often work out to be double the raw salaries which would bring the average down to a slightly less excessive $170k/year.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#152

Post by Canada »

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…

> That's $338k/head on average.

Oh come on. Just because the organization is non-profit, meaning that it's not out to make a profit for shareholders, is no justification for the staff to be paid below their market worth. In fact, they could definitely earn more by quitting and working at for profit companies. And that is especially true for those who are getting the higher end of the compensation.

And say that staff number was like, $5m/year less? It doesn't change the fact that costs of running are substantial and more donation is needed from those who want it to remain viable.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#153

Post by lxgr »

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?)

Accepting these payments would not be trivial, and linking them to Signal accounts would create a treasure trove of metadata that neither Signal nor its users would likely be very happy about.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#155

Post by rodlette »

hansSjoberg wrote: post #100
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.

A few employees and their compensation are listed on their Form 990, page 7. Sidenote: did "Moxie" legally change his name from Matthew Rosenfeld? https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...

They have devs and support engineers earning 700k, more than the CTO?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#156

Post by davidhyde »

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…

How about they pull their socks up and use peer to peer technology instead? Messages are asynchronous so they need to be temporarily stored but routing real-time audio and video is a technology problem that they have chosen the expensive way to solve.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#157

Post by foobarian »

jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #140
vore wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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. You get what you pay for, though. $338k/year seems like a reasonable salary for people working on something as privacy critical as Signal – just because you're working for a nonprofit doesn't mean you have to work for less competitive wages.

Also, employees cost more than just their salary.

I wouldn't be surprised if overhead turned out 1/3 of that figure.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#158

Post by Rastonbury »

Aissen wrote: post #97

The cloud tax is crazy (especially bandwidth). Pretty sure Signal has reached the scale where they would be cheaper by building their infra, maybe starting with the most expensive (storage + bandwidth), and then doing others. SMS is (unfortunately) core to the product, so I'm not certain how they could make it cheaper, while retaining the same properties (user+pass registration would be a nightmare for spam and chang…

Anyone know much does it become worth it to build your own? They spend around $3-4m on storage and bandwidth

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#159

Post by collaborative »

FB only wanted whatsapp to preempt a potential competitor. They are happy to give the service for free (at a loss)

There is no room for monetization because of FB. In other words, you can't compete with a monopoly, even if you are in a different business. They simply take all

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#160

Post by darth_avocado »

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…

> far cheaper IT labor outside

This is a product that solves some of the harder problems of engineering, and has a staff of 50. Cheaper isn’t going to get you the best. If you had a staff of 1000, you could make that argument. Besides that’s not a lot of money to begin with. 340k is a senior engineer salary and I am sure the people running the company are far more capable than senior engineers.

> drop those features

That’s a valid argument, but 1.7M for that 20PB of bandwidth is not a lot of money. Dropping or making the features paid, defeats the purpose. If you’re trying to be the privacy first app that competes with WhatsApp and others, this would make it harder to be a viable alternative.

> sms registration fees

Education is a harder problem to solve, but offloading some of the costs to users may make sense here.

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