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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#261

Post by yetanotherloss »

zozskuh wrote: post #95
yetanotherloss wrote: post #42

Who is the active user base for signal these days? Everyone I knew who was using it dropped off after the SMS debacle, which was a shame. Edit: Wow some weird haters on HN today. I was honestly curious as an active signal user that was no longer able to use it to message people in North America and had never seen anyone using it in East Asia. Apparently this makes some other signal users very angry.

I still use it, and ask my friends & family to use it as well. What would you recommend to use instead of Signal?

I have yet to find a replacement that both I like and other people use. Matrix and Session I have yet to find anyone using, telegram seems to be almost entirely bots in my area, and WhatsApp etc are owned by Meta.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#262

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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…

> I'd drop these features if possible, or give them to donors.

They can't really do that, it deters adoption of something with a network effect.

The real issue here is that direct connections have privacy implications (maybe you don't want the other party to know your IP address), so they relay everything. If they could solve that they could save a lot of money.

For example, detect if the user is connected via a known VPN service (which is likely given Signal's user base) and then let the VPN hide the user's IP address instead of Signal having to pay for it. Or make a deal with popular VPNs to put the relay servers in their data centers, which gives a similar advantage and they might be able to get better pricing from them in general because the VPNs already have a lot of bandwidth, are sympathetic to what Signal does and could use it as PR.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#263

Post by dghlsakjg »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #243
chimeracoder wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter said that's why they got rid of the SMS 2FA. They said it was costing millions to have that enabled for them. Previous Twitter employees have said that this is incorrect. Because Twitter began as an SMS-only (and then SMS-first) application (remember 40404?), they very early on established direct-connection infrastructure for sending SMS, meaning that they have a marginal cost of literally $0.00/message in…

> they very early on established direct-connection infrastructure for sending SMS, meaning that they have a marginal cost of literally $0.00/message in most markets. I am very, very interested to understand how that works, because without more detail or sources I'm calling bullshit. I definitely understand how Twitter could have greatly reduced their per-message fee with telecom providers, but at the end of the day T…

Not who you are responding to, but my guess is that it was all fixed costs. They spend $20mm (or whatever) to maintain access, and maintain infrastructure and they get to send as many SMS messages as they want.

So sending 1 costs the same as sending a 10 million. It isn't that they are free to send, its that they are charged for access to the system, but aren't charged per message.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#264

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#265

Post by Y-bar »

newscracker wrote: post #237

This was a nice, detailed read. At some point, Signal would have to move out of cloud providers at least for a few things to manage costs better. I was happy to note this about employee compensation since paying them well is a good thing apart from their personal motivation to work on this (even at a comparatively lower pay than in other companies/projects): > When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salari…

> Firstly, it refuses to provide a data backup mechanism for iOS/iPadOS. If someone loses their devices, there is no way to restore older messages.

This is not the only case where Signal has decided that users should not be in control of their own data. For example an Apple Store or authorised repair shop may need to reset the phone, or an OS upgrade goes badly and needs a restore will also lead to data loss even if there is a full local encrypted backup made.

It is really orthogonal to the much of what Signal claims to stand for them to so boneheadedly insist that users should not be allowed to own and control their own data.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#266

Post by maxfurman »

Rastonbury wrote: post #158
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

Data centers cost billions. Signal, and pretty much everyone else who isn't already in the data center business, is far away from breakeven on that.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#267

Post by YeBanKo »

m3kw9 wrote: post #240

They could use a free plus subscription model for really pro features, like “extra privacy”, “faster sending speed”, “create bigger group rooms”, these are bad features but you get it

As soon as there is “extra privacy” for a premium, I would ditch Signal immediately. It’s either provate and secure or it’s not. Certain things cannot be half measured.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#268

Post by abdullahkhalids »

V__ wrote: post #36

Signal had 40 million active users in 2021 [1]. With 14 million in infra cost, that comes to .35 per user/year. Total expenses are about 33 million, so about .825 per user/year. All in all that seems very reasonable. [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/signal-statistics/

Mastodon org + Mastodon.social also have costs of 0.6 EUR/year, though they have two orders of magnitude less users [1]. This is really what most social media costs. These rates are even payable by many in poorer countries.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38117385

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#269

Post by troupo »

itslennysfault wrote: post #180
aalimov_ wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> stubbornly use iMessange. Personally, I prefer it over downloading yet another client, dealing with additional credentials, wondering about who can access my messages, and so on and so forth… And all that just to message the handful of people that I know who use .

If only someone would release a universal protocol that the app's native messaging apps could utilize to eliminate the need for these 3rd party messaging apps. Oh, right, it's called RCS and Apple refuses to support it.

> Oh, right, it's called RCS and Apple refuses to support it.

No one wants to support it. Even telecoms don't want to support it.

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