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
I’ve been using signal since forever. Recently when there was a big exodus from Whatsapp because of their changed data policies was the first time I felt an impact with response time in the app etc. I immediately set up a regular donation. A few months later they came out with there cryptocurrency scheme I decided I won’t be funding any cryptocurrency so I cancelled my donations. I trust signal on the technical side implicitly. But they have lost my trust in the business side :/
The crypto highly annoys me too and I was against it, but we can turn it off and nothing changes which is good. I still believe the dev time should have gone elsewhere. But I’m not as bothered as I was in the begining. Same with stories, never used it before signal in other platforms and had to study wtf they were when it appeared on signal. Now I can see and understand a bit of the use case but I have never seen any of my dozens of friends that use signal use that feature. Still something that can be turned off. I’ve used it to share memes.
Anyway, they claimed heavily that there were markets that would absolutely require that feature since people are used to it in other chat platforms, and if it really brings people to a better platform that is signal I’m ok with it. What I’d really like to see is if the claim now holds true or not and understand if the dev and money time spent in those features really got more users in the app or not and if it was worth the cost vs other features.
Lost me (and many family members) when they dropped support for SMS.
And yes, I will keep on bringing that up on every topic about Signal.
This was a bad move and I’m sure Signal has been bleeding their userbase ever since they have done it.
Their user base has grown tremendously since they dropped support for SMS. Just read the article.
Same here. It was basically the only way to convince non technical users to use it. It’s a better texting client than the default Android messages app.
Am kind of annoyed at the fact they go out and say they need more money to keep working on it, while at the same time keep doing features people don’t want. My entire contact list asked me how to disable stories the very moment they were released. Then they added crypto, and payments and whatnot. All while people are repeating they want username based accounts and editing features. Video calls in Signal still doesn’t have add person to call. You are simply not able to have a group call with people without creating a group first. But sure as hell we have crypto.