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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

#511

Post by websap »

conductr wrote: post #509

I'm seeing all the comments about the $6m Twilio expense, but nothing commenting on how their cost per employee is $380,000 totaling $19m. I think they could optimize this easier if the will was there. I know HN is very SV/tech centric, and that number makes sense there given the run up of VC money, etc. but I'm willing to bet they could source talent from cheaper places and slash this in half; if they wanted to. Jus…

If you want to hire the best talent - engineering and ethics, you need to pay top dollar. 380k is senior engineer comp at most FAANG adjacent companies. It's not a lot.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#513

Post by wg0 »

conductr wrote: post #509

I'm seeing all the comments about the $6m Twilio expense, but nothing commenting on how their cost per employee is $380,000 totaling $19m. I think they could optimize this easier if the will was there. I know HN is very SV/tech centric, and that number makes sense there given the run up of VC money, etc. but I'm willing to bet they could source talent from cheaper places and slash this in half; if they wanted to. Jus…

Craftsmen's compensation is a non negotiable matter IMHO.

It's not someone's fault if they happen to live in a particular economic climate.

The real root cause isn't the engineering or infrastructure cost.

It is about people paying their fair share myself included.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#514

Post by 0xjmp »

conductr wrote: post #509

I'm seeing all the comments about the $6m Twilio expense, but nothing commenting on how their cost per employee is $380,000 totaling $19m. I think they could optimize this easier if the will was there. I know HN is very SV/tech centric, and that number makes sense there given the run up of VC money, etc. but I'm willing to bet they could source talent from cheaper places and slash this in half; if they wanted to. Jus…

This idea that an equivalent level of talent to SV is readily available in Indiana or Costa Rica for cheaper pay is deeply flawed.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#515

Post by bzbz »

conductr wrote: post #509

I'm seeing all the comments about the $6m Twilio expense, but nothing commenting on how their cost per employee is $380,000 totaling $19m. I think they could optimize this easier if the will was there. I know HN is very SV/tech centric, and that number makes sense there given the run up of VC money, etc. but I'm willing to bet they could source talent from cheaper places and slash this in half; if they wanted to. Jus…

This number includes taxes, benefits, etc, not just raw salary.

Notably Signal employees do not get equity, so the salary must be higher to remain competitive.

Signal is probably the hardest class of product to build. Name an optimization/distributed systems problem, they probably have it. And quite literally, a Signal bug could jeopardize an activist/journalist’s life.

So for a I simply wouldn’t trust the product, if it had mediocre engineers.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#516

Post by benreesman »

conductr wrote: post #509

I'm seeing all the comments about the $6m Twilio expense, but nothing commenting on how their cost per employee is $380,000 totaling $19m. I think they could optimize this easier if the will was there. I know HN is very SV/tech centric, and that number makes sense there given the run up of VC money, etc. but I'm willing to bet they could source talent from cheaper places and slash this in half; if they wanted to. Jus…

It grinds my gears when people on a hacker forum lobby for hackers to make less.

When it’s people who are running a worldwide communications network on the cheap without getting hacked all the time? Absolute pros.

I don’t downvote, let alone flag, but I hate this comment.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#517

Post by gwd »

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/

This is kind of the number I was looking for -- "Cover your own costs: $1/year. Cover yourself and five other people: $5/year." I feel like something pointing out that the costs are around $1/year on signing up, maybe with a reminder once a year, would get most people self-funding pretty quickly.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#518

Post by mortallywounded »

AnonHP wrote: post #357
mortallywounded wrote: post #275

I don't understand how storage can cost a million dollars when they don't store anything. Even if messages are queued, how do you get millions of dollars in queued storage? It's hard for me to imagine... even if you receive and send trillions of messages I don't think you would end up storing much at all. As for registration fees, it sounds like they should use authenticator instead of SMS... and stop requiring a pho…

> Even if messages are queued, how do you get millions of dollars in queued storage? It's hard for me to imagine... The details are there in this post, but I can offer a few guesses. Users may be using multiple devices. And the service has to deliver to all the linked devices before ejecting the message from its storage. The time limit for storing and waiting for linked devices to come online is about a month. With t…

Even if every user had dozens of queued up messages, I don't think it equals millions in storage costs. Maybe I'm naive, but I have a storage/database/queue with billions of records and it costs shrugs

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#519

Post by Aachen »

crtasm wrote: post #481
Aachen wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some good news: go into the settings and turn on encrypted backups. The clients also all come with a search function, even if it only matches against start-of-word (which includes URLs, so you can't search for domain names which regularly bothers me). Directory integration, as in, importing a vcard with everyone's phone number into your device such that you can tap on anyone's name and message them on Signal i…

The backup option is Android-only.

O.o TIL. That's weird, apple users already have plenty of lock-in and own-data-inaccessibility, but so maybe they figured they clearly don't care? Weird as heck either way

Then what I can recommend is installing the desktop client on a server somewhere and reading its sqlite-like (but with some flaky encryption extension) messages database

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#520

Post by [deleted] »

rasso wrote: post #351
nvy wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people, myself included, have it installed but never use it after they dropped SMS support. Only a tiny fraction of my contacts use Signal, and most of those are also on Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, and others. Signal offers essentially nothing to me.

Except real privacy?

[deleted]
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