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
There’s something kind of funny about one of the largest expenses being SMS and voice calls to verify phone numbers when one of the largest complaints about signal is the phone number requirement. I wonder how much this cost factors into them considering dropping the phone number requirement.
If they drop the phone number requirements, you will get spam, a lot of spam. Much more than now.
Make phone numbers optional and add a setting to allow/forbid accounts with no phone number to message you. I bet phone numbers have zero effect on the level of spam.
Because there are no other possible verifications apart from phone numbers? Do you open a bank account with your phone number, because it’s the only way?
I open a bank account with a copy of my id, a copy of a bill to my adress, and some money. My phone number can be used along the process, like for a digital signature.
What would you think would be an appropriate alternative to easily verify chat accounts that’s cheaper than validating phone numbers?
I’d be ok with a credit card verification or so something like that, even if still uncomfortable for me, but I hear it reduces a lot of spam.
But then that would make people confused and make them run away when the app seems to be free and now is asking for a credit card validation… it’s too strange.
Anyway I never got a single spam message on signal from all the years I use it, so not sure how others view the problem or even if it is a problem.
Phone numbers will still be required to sign up, you only won’t need it to add a contact.
Seriously? Boo :(
Probably helps cut down on spam and bot accounts
Interestingly this phone number complaint only shows up among techies and especially Americans. You guys don’t get to keep your phone number? I’ve had the same number now for 20 years here in Europe, it may as well be synonymous with my identity.
In fact, I’d say the phone number requirement, or at least option, actually promotes adoption in parts of the world. I wouldn’t have been able to get my mother to use Signal if it didn’t work with a phone number, for instance. She’s not gonna make an account just for a chat app. Phone number she already has.
Exactly because I have the same phone number for almost 30 years, that is the problem. It’s too deep interlaced with my real and personal identity and I regard it as a very private thing that only few people should have.
I don’t get the idea that a phone number should just be randomly given as if it was natural.
It’s good to have it as an option for example so my mother can use it simply and quickly, but when I go to a conference and want to connect to new people which are still strangers and will and don’t give my phone number. So in those situations I have to randomly use other chat system or share emails? When signal already is in my pocket and my main chat application 99% of the time and is perfect for 1 to 1 friendly chats?
It’s actually a privacy issue because your phone number is tied to your physical identity so deeply that giving it out is giving too much away.
because people might feel uncomfortable sending unnecessary personal information to another party, especially if it does not change often, like the telephone number?
I’m mostly contacting people I already know so using phone number (something I already have a collection of) is very handy to me
My kids don’t have a phone number and I would be glad we could use Signal.
should be optional.