Tech

Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

Signal, the world’s most widely used truly private messaging app, made a blog post about their operating costs. They are estimating that by 2025 Signal will require $50 million dollars per year to operate.

They provided a breakdown of their current expenses:

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.
Employees: $19 million dollars per year

So that’s around $14 million per year in infrastructure and $19 million per year in employees. Whats shocking to me is the $6 million per year in fees to send registration codes via SMS or voice calls. They really should consider moving away from using phone numbers as identification.

Anyway, if you are a user of Signal, you should consider making a donation to the foundation. You can donate directly within the signal app (and receive a digital badge in return), or on their website.