Signal’s president reveals the cost of running the privacy-preserving platform—not just to drum up donations, but to call out the for-profit surveillance business models it competes against.

The encrypted messaging and calling app Signal has become a one-of-a-kind phenomenon in the tech world: It has grown from the preferred encrypted messenger for the paranoid privacy elite into a legitimately mainstream service with hundreds of millions of installs worldwide. And it has done this entirely as a nonprofit effort, with no venture capital or monetization model, all while holding its own against the best-funded Silicon Valley competitors in the world, like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Gmail, and iMessage.

Today, Signal is revealing something about what it takes to pull that off—and it’s not cheap. For the first time, the Signal Foundation that runs the app has published a full breakdown of Signal’s operating costs: around $40 million this year, projected to hit $50 million by 2025.

Signal’s president, Meredith Whittaker, says her decision to publish the detailed cost numbers in a blog post for the first time—going well beyond the IRS disclosures legally required of nonprofits—was more than just as a frank appeal for year-end donations. By revealing the price of operating a modern communications service, she says, she wanted to call attention to how competitors pay these same expenses: either by profiting directly from monetizing users’ data or, she argues, by locking users into networks that very often operate with that same corporate surveillance business model.

“By being honest about these costs ourselves, we believe that helps provide a view of the engine of the tech industry, the surveillance business model, that is not always apparent to people,” Whittaker tells WIRED. Running a service like Signal—or WhatsApp or Gmail or Telegram—is, she says, “surprisingly expensive. You may not know that, and there’s a good reason you don’t know that, and it’s because it’s not something that companies who pay those expenses via surveillance want you to know.”

Signal pays $14 million a year in infrastructure costs, for instance, including the price of servers, bandwidth, and storage. It uses about 20 petabytes per year of bandwidth, or 20 million gigabytes, to enable voice and video calling alone, which comes to $1.7 million a year. The biggest chunk of those infrastructure costs, fully $6 million annually, goes to telecom firms to pay for the SMS text messages Signal uses to send registration codes to verify new Signal accounts’ phone numbers. That cost has gone up, Signal says, as telecom firms charge more for those text messages in an effort to offset the shrinking use of SMS in favor of cheaper services like Signal and WhatsApp worldwide.

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. In 2016, Signal had just three full-time employees working in a single room in a coworking space in San Francisco. “People didn’t take vacations,” Whittaker says. “People didn’t get on planes because they didn’t want to be offline if there was an outage or something.” While that skeleton-crew era is over—Whittaker says it wasn’t sustainable for those few overworked staffers—she argues that a team of 50 people is still a tiny number compared to services with similar-sized user bases, which often have thousands of employees.

read more: https://www.wired.com/story/signal-operating-costs/

archive link: https://archive.ph/O5rzD

  • WallEx@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Video call, email, other verificated factors.

    So do you think this is the only option available?

    • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.gg
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      1 year ago

      You think a verification via a video call is cheaper than SMS…?

      That’s not to mention the potential concerns that would arise around the possibility of signal storing (some portion of) the video…

      • WallEx@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Nope, just saying phone numbers are far from the only option. And if telcos are price gauging you should look at the alternatives.

        • Gutless2615@ttrpg.network
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          1 year ago

          No you’ve complained and insinuated there are plenty of other solutions that the world class team at Signal, literally the preminent experts in their field, chose not to use - and then offered to some truly next level terrible options.

          • WallEx@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            Complained? I’ve merely stated a fact. And you think I’m offended? I’m trying to have a discussion you are not interested in it seems.

            How are the other options terrible? Please elaborate. That way you might actually contribute and not just call names.

        • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.gg
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          1 year ago

          Nope, just saying phone numbers are far from the only option.

          What would you think would be an appropriate alternative to easily verify chat accounts that’s cheaper than validating phone numbers?

          It’s the cheaper portion that’s the issue. There are “other options”, but they’re not cheaper and/or they have their own issues.

          I didn’t touch the email case because email addresses can be so rapidly created (even out of thin air via a catch all style inbox) there’s nothing to it.

          • WallEx@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            But if telcos are inflating the prices that might change. But otherwise I think you’re right.

    • PlexSheep@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Video call is expensive, and frankly, if I’m gonna sign up at a private service, I’m not going to make a damn video call.

      Email is not enough to go against spam. Email addresses are basically an Infinite Ressource.

      Other verified factors are nothing concrete. Sure we could all use security hardware keys, but what’s the chances that my mom has one?

      • uis@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Other verified factors are nothing concrete. Sure we could all use security hardware keys, but what’s the chances that my mom has one?

        PKI doesn’t require hardware keys

        • PlexSheep@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          True, but it’s not exactly User friendly too, right? If not, tell me. I’ll be happy.

          • uis@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            If you want user-friendly WebAuthn - firefox does it for you. If you want pgp/gpg, then just install pgp/gpg client of your choice.

            If you want encrypt emails, Thunderbird should have built-in encryption support.

            • PlexSheep@feddit.de
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              1 year ago

              I’m using all of these, but with my hardware keys. Didn’t know you could do it without. I knew that it was part of the webauthn concept but no idea how it works.

      • WallEx@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        So you do think that phone numbers are the only way to verify the person? This is just stupid. There are enough, like IDs or stuff like that. If you don’t want that, that’s a totally different story.

        • LemmyIsFantastic@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Jesus Christ you Linux people never learn… It’s 👏 about 👏 ease of 👏 use.

          If they wanted it to be a pain in the ass and for nobody to use they could put on a ui on top of pgp and call it a day.

          • PlexSheep@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            There was no need to generalize Linux people. This discussion has nothing to do with Linux.

            • WallEx@feddit.de
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              1 year ago

              I’m not arguing that, I’m arguing the point, that this is the only option. Because it isn’t. If you find that funny, be my guest.

              • PlexSheep@feddit.de
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                1 year ago

                What alternative to phone numbers would you recommend? I’d probably prefer it over giving my phone number away.

                • WallEx@feddit.de
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                  1 year ago

                  Something like a verified work mail or a cryptographic certificate protected with a password, confirming your identity, I don’t really know ^^ but phone numbers are old and are getting more and more expensive, as the article lays out

                  • PlexSheep@feddit.de
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                    1 year ago

                    The infrastructure for none of these exist (in my country at least). Phone numbers suck, but as signal is a application mostly used on phones, I think it is the most common denominator for the user base.

          • WallEx@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            How does that have anything to do with Linux? It’s about phone verification as the supposed only option.

            Does Microsoft need your phone to validate your existence?

            How does anyone think, that there are no alternatives?

              • WallEx@feddit.de
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                1 year ago

                Okay. And how are phone numbers validated? Not by using phone numbers. It’s not the only option. They also use personalized domains, certificates, IDs and the likes.

                • LemmyIsFantastic@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Right, folks are definitely going to sign up when it just needs you to copy you identity information and send it in and wait 4 weeks 🤦‍♂️

                  Yes, there is a whole bunch of pain in the ass shit you can try to force prime to use. They won’t, and the service will be worthless for all but 5 neckbeards laughing about how private they are. 🤦‍♂️

                  • WallEx@feddit.de
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                    1 year ago

                    Probably. Just saying it’s not “the only option”. And I’m also pretty sure they could figure out another way to ID people, if they had enough funds to do so. But maybe this still wouldn’t be adopted, who knows.

        • PlexSheep@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          It’s a bad problem no? Combatting “spam” Accounts while balancing privacy.

          Personally, I don’t want to give them any more information than is really necessary.