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Ask HN: How does Signal afford operational costs?
I understand they are a non-profit and accept donations, but I assume a majority of the users are not paid. How do they afford to operate their server costs and where are they hosted? What engineering optimization have they done to reduce costs? For example they recently added video chat, does it use P2P technology? Curious!
- rococode 6y agoMy understanding is that most of their current funding is from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, who has loaned them $50-105m at 0% interest, to be repaid in ~50 years (I can find confirmation that Acton donated $50m and that their current assets are $105m, but I'm not clear on whether he was also the one who loaned the additional $55m). And before they had that big loan, they were operating on smaller grants and donations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Foundation#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Foundation#History https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/824506840/12_2019_prefixes_82-86%2F824506840_201812_990_2019121216951146 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/82450...
- cloudking 6y agoThanks for the info, surely they could burn through that as the service gains popularity, do you think?