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Figure out how people will continue to donate and not deviate from their original mission, given the push from new users for feature parity with Telegram and Wh

Figure out how people will continue to donate and not deviate from their original mission, given the push from new users for feature parity with Telegram and WhatsApp. I cant imagine that $100mn lasting if people are doing group calls, file transfers etc. because those are expensive activities with the needs for servers, bandwidth. Previously they had the luxury to coast because of that donation, now not so much.

eddieoz 6y ago
Agreed. The core services are working very well and business decisions because of this new market opportunity can drive them to pivot to something totally different.
- bilal4hmed 6y ago
  the speed at which such a small team is working at is commendable but just take a look at the beta forum and see the how much faster they are moving in the new beta release for Android. Its a far more buggier release compared to the careful approach. Keep this up and signal will be a remnant of its former self.
toomuchtodo 6y ago
Colocation, equipment, and admin time should be no more than $1-2 million/year. Reference OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, similar non profit infra expenses in their IRS non profit return [1]. You most definitely don't want to be at a cloud provider with their bandwidth charges. The Internet Archive runs ~50Gbit/sec, peaking at ~62Gbit/sec [2]. [1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/ https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/ [2] http://blog.archive.org/2020/05/11/thank-you-for-helping-us-increase-our-bandwidth/ http://blog.archive.org/2020/05/11/thank-you-for-helping-us-...
- bilal4hmed 6y ago
  They are using AWS for their infrastructure. Based on their last Form 980, which is from 2018 their expenses were about $5 million. That expense was with < 10 mn users and a much smaller dev team. Since 2018 theyve added more android and ios developers.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Hope they get on to their own gear sooner rather than later. Any exorbitant cloud costs they can avoid are funds that can go into development, and I'd rather what I'm donating goes to said devs and not AWS (not that there's anything wrong with AWS per se, but donations are harder to come by then business revenue and VC funding). Would really appreciate if Signal would give rough estimates of their infra needs (average and peak bandwidth, storage, compute, etc).
- Shish2k 6y ago
  > You most definitely don't want to be at a cloud provider with their bandwidth charges. Amen to that, I don’t understand how anybody decides to go in that direction for this type of project. For my relatively small hobby-project (3Gbit/s image gallery) we’re renting bare-metal servers for $800/mo — cloud providers would be charging $50,000 just for bandwidth, let alone compute and storage… (Incidentally if anybody knows good CDNs with prices in the same ballpark as bare-metal I’d love to hear it - looks like we’re too big for any of cloudflare’s entry-level plans, but their enterprise support doesn’t want to bother with any customer spending less than $3,000/mo...)
  - ApolloFortyNine 6y ago
    I've used BunnyCDN for small projects and it's been great, and their pricing is the lowest I found from any CDN.

eddieoz 6y ago

Agreed. The core services are working very well and business decisions because of this new market opportunity can drive them to pivot to something totally different.

bilal4hmed 6y ago
the speed at which such a small team is working at is commendable but just take a look at the beta forum and see the how much faster they are moving in the new beta release for Android. Its a far more buggier release compared to the careful approach. Keep this up and signal will be a remnant of its former self.

toomuchtodo 6y ago

Colocation, equipment, and admin time should be no more than $1-2 million/year. Reference OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, similar non profit infra expenses in their IRS non profit return [1]. You most definitely don't want to be at a cloud provider with their bandwidth charges. The Internet Archive runs ~50Gbit/sec, peaking at ~62Gbit/sec [2]. [1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/ https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/ [2] http://blog.archive.org/2020/05/11/thank-you-for-helping-us-increase-our-bandwidth/ http://blog.archive.org/2020/05/11/thank-you-for-helping-us-...

bilal4hmed 6y ago
They are using AWS for their infrastructure. Based on their last Form 980, which is from 2018 their expenses were about $5 million. That expense was with < 10 mn users and a much smaller dev team. Since 2018 theyve added more android and ios developers.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Hope they get on to their own gear sooner rather than later. Any exorbitant cloud costs they can avoid are funds that can go into development, and I'd rather what I'm donating goes to said devs and not AWS (not that there's anything wrong with AWS per se, but donations are harder to come by then business revenue and VC funding). Would really appreciate if Signal would give rough estimates of their infra needs (average and peak bandwidth, storage, compute, etc).
Shish2k 6y ago
> You most definitely don't want to be at a cloud provider with their bandwidth charges. Amen to that, I don’t understand how anybody decides to go in that direction for this type of project. For my relatively small hobby-project (3Gbit/s image gallery) we’re renting bare-metal servers for $800/mo — cloud providers would be charging $50,000 just for bandwidth, let alone compute and storage… (Incidentally if anybody knows good CDNs with prices in the same ballpark as bare-metal I’d love to hear it - looks like we’re too big for any of cloudflare’s entry-level plans, but their enterprise support doesn’t want to bother with any customer spending less than $3,000/mo...)
- ApolloFortyNine 6y ago
  I've used BunnyCDN for small projects and it's been great, and their pricing is the lowest I found from any CDN.