8 ms·
Signal had 40 million active users in 2021 [1]. With 14 million in infra cost, that comes to .35 per user/year. Total expenses are about 33 million, so about .8
by V__ 3y ago
Signal had 40 million active users in 2021 [1]. With 14 million in infra cost, that comes to .35 per user/year. Total expenses are about 33 million, so about .825 per user/year. All in all that seems very reasonable.
[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/signal-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/signal-statistics/
- rogerkirkness 3y agoBased on App Store downloads on both platforms, they are well over 200M at this point.
- nvy 3y agoA lot of people, myself included, have it installed but never use it after they dropped SMS support. Only a tiny fraction of my contacts use Signal, and most of those are also on Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, and others. Signal offers essentially nothing to me.
- rasso 3y agoExcept real privacy?
- sam_lowry_ 3y agoNot even that, because it is linked to phone numbers.
- OoooooooO 3y agoAfaik you can crrate an account without a number.
- wkat4242 3y agoNo. You can just hide it from other users in group chats now (and perhaps 1:1, didn't yet check but you still need one to sign up)
- crtasm 3y agoWhere is the option for group chats please?
- Obscurity4340 3y agoDoes that require the sealed-sender thingy?
- matricaria 3y agoNot yet, but they are working on that.
- leotravis10 3y agoYep, a great example: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/why_not_signal.html#phone--identifiers https://dessalines.github.io/essays/why_not_signal.html#phon...
- marvinborner 3y agoUsername registration is currently being tested: https://community.signalusers.org/t/public-username-testing-staging-environment/56866 https://community.signalusers.org/t/public-username-testing-...
- ixwt 3y ago> and register for a new account with a phone number (you can use the same one you’re using in Production). I hope that they make it so you can register WITHOUT a phone number. Perfectly fine if it's not the default. This is post is currently implying that is not currently the case.
- leshenka 3y agoSo this puts signal on par with telegram, not above? Am I missing something?
- Summershard 3y agoTelegram's encryption is opt-in which means most people don't use the encrypted chats at all.
- Summershard 3y agoSignal is private, but not anonymous. Related, but two different things.
- School-Cotton 3y agoWhy is it more private than WhatsApp?
- Ar-Curunir 3y agoI encourage you to read the article, but Signal minimizes the metadata it stores about you, doesn't hold on to you contact list, doesn't keep information about your IP address, etc. WhatsApp instead makes tons of money from this kind of metadata.
- crtasm 3y agoUsing WhatsApp means Facebook/Meta knows the timestamp, sender and recipient of every message sent.
- kroltan 3y agoPay attention to WhatsApp's wording (all privacy/security claims start with "your messages"), and their privacy policy, and you'll see that while message involving with individuals (non-Business users) are secured, your contact list is not, neither are chats with businesses or the metadata about you chatting (destinations, frequency, time)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hiatus 3y agoThe sms decision made signal go from THE messaging app on my phone to an app I only use with a very small subset of my contacts. It is infuriating that they didn't allow users to retain that functionality when it costs them nothing, and they could have disabled it by default.
- urig 3y agoYou paid them nothing and are infuriated. Interesting.
- nani8ot 3y agoMany people care about Signal, and it is okay to dislike their decision. OP didn't demand from Signal to support SMS, but they expressed their emotions about the change. Signal is an awesome project but some of their decisions annoy many users. E.g. Signal does not allow to automatically save all pictures in the gallery. It's a privacy feature, but it's inconvenient since it forces me remember to download each image seperately.
- psalminen 3y agoI still use Signal a lot, since most people I frequently talk to use it. However, this was extremely frustrating. Having 1 messaging app for so long was incredibly nice.
- hezralig 3y agoMy lawyer stopped using signal due to the sms support being dropped. It became too much of a hassle and wasn't worth it. Many of my family also dropped Signal. It is now really only used by the hyper-privacy conscious.
- HKH2 3y agoI really don't get why people are still using SMS. Is data really that expensive?
- leptons 3y agoI'd be happy to pay $1/year for signal, and I'd pay $2/year if it were decoupled from my phone number.
- lxgr 3y agoIf you pay Signal $1/year, they'll realistically see about 60-70 cents of that – and that's only considering payment processor fees. Now add the cost of providing support (it's a paid product now!), payment handling on their end (in a privacy-preserving way, which excludes most common payment methods), and top it off with the immense damage to the network effect by excluding all the users that can't or simply don't want to pay $1/year... Donations seem like the much better option here.
- eviks 3y agoYou can also charge for a 10 year minimum and get to a higher retained % You don't need to provide support, even much more expensive consumer services live without a proper one, so being explicit about the fact that you only pay for infrastructure could suffice Not sure why payment privacy has to be so strict for everyone The network effect damage is real, but maybe it could be limited with donations :)
- lxgr 3y agoSelling a service automatically opts you in to all kinds of consumer protections, either legally or de facto through the dispute mechanism of the payment methods your customers use. Just ignoring customer complaints and selling the service "as-is" is usually not an option.
- eviks 3y agoWhy is it not an option when it already exists in many places (all these protections fail all the time)? Your first sentence doesn't imply high/expensive level of customer service Besides, even now they're not ignoring all the complaints, the do fix bugs? Maybe to be more specific, how much did it cost WhatsApp when they had $1 price and a tiny team? How does it compare to the cost of SMS?
- renewiltord 3y agoI wonder how many people paid the $5 for WhatsApp back in the day. It gave you nothing but you were able to do it. I think I did.
- abdullahkhalids 3y agoWhatsapp was asking for $1/year [1] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/18/whatsapp-drops-subscription-fee-free https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/18/whatsapp-...
- lxgr 3y agoI've been using WhatsApp when the nominal $1/year fee was still around, but somehow never ended up being actually charged, and I don't know anyone that did. It's possible that they were only enforcing it in some regions, though.
- abdullahkhalids 3y agoIndeed. I just ignored the dialog box the first time it popped up. But next year I paid. It was quite a big deal because back then it was equal to my entire monthly cellphone bill in Pakistan. But I remember other people started to en masse switch to other messengers like Viber(?). And Whatsapp had to stop enforcing the fee.
- fwn 3y agoI was billed 0,99€ (Germany) exactly once, but was able to use WhatsApp without payment for most of the time just by ignoring the notification. I remember that they repeatedly gave grace periods and just set another payment date a few weeks later.
- renewiltord 3y agoThe price changed a few times but they definitely had a lifetime thing once. All pricing was entirely optional Here's one reference to a different price (can't find lifetime except for people complaining that Facebook didn't honor it on original ToS) https://www.wired.com/2011/11/whatsapp-messenger-app/ https://www.wired.com/2011/11/whatsapp-messenger-app/
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoDefinitely reasonable but the ultra privacy-conscious/paranoid can't easily donate or pay privately.
- groby_b 3y agoSure, but privacy isn't black or white. A donation to signal does not compromise the content of your messaging. So what you've leaked is the information that you have an interest in private conversations. This might be a problem in some countries, but I think it's fair to ask folks in affluent countries with working (sorta) democracies to shoulder that burden. I.e. you don't donate if there's elevated threat to your safety, there are enough people who aren't under elevated threat. There's also the possibility of using a donation mixer like Silent Donor, though I'd evaluate that very carefully. (There's a record of the transfer in, and the mixer needs to keep temporary records for transferring out. There's also the question how you verify the mixer doesn't skim.) Some donation mixers accept crypto currency, so for maximum paranoia, I suppose crypto->crypto mixer->donation mixer->charity might be workable. Or hand cash to a friend who donates in your stead. As always, the best path is to set aside paranoia and build a threat model instead to see what the actual risks are.
- godelski 3y agoThere's never enough talk like this and I'm not sure why. It's always about the threat model. In this respect I always like to think of it in terms of probability. Probabilities and likelihoods aren't just about capturing randomness like quantum fluctuations or rolling dice, they are fundamentally about capturing uncertainty. Your threat model is your conditions and you can only calculate likelihoods as you don't know everything. There are no guarantees of privacy or security. This is why I always hated the conversations around when Signal was discussing deleting messages and people were saying that it's useless because someone could have saved the message before you deleted them. But this is also standard practice in industry because they understand the probabilistic framework and that there's a good chance that you delete before they save. Framing privacy and security as binary/deterministic options doesn't just do a poor but "good enough approximation" of these but actually leads you to make decisions that would decrease your privacy and security! It's like brute forcing, we just want something where we'd be surprised if someone could accomplish it within the lifetime of the universe though technically it is possible for them to get it on the very first try if they are very very lucky. Which is an extreme understatement. It's far more likely that you could walk up to a random door, put the wrong key in, have the door's lock fall out of place, and open it to find a bear, a methhead, and a Rabbi sitting around a table drinking tea, playing cards, and the Rabbi has a full house. I'll take my odds on 256 bit encryption.
- abdullahkhalids 3y agoMastodon org + Mastodon.social also have costs of 0.6 EUR/year, though they have two orders of magnitude less users [1]. This is really what most social media costs. These rates are even payable by many in poorer countries. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38117385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38117385
- fmajid 3y agoIIRC WhatsApp used to charge $1 per year https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/ https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/
- jeroenhd 3y agoWith how much Mastodon.social tends to fall over when Twitter does something stupid (again), their rates are probably a bit too low for a more robust service like Signal. Signal also intentionally doesn't store too much data, long term data costs will slowly grow over the years. I imagine for a bigger platform, costs can grow to multiples of the rates for Signal and smaller Mastodon servers. €10 per year should be more than enough for most users, though, and it should be quite affordable for most countries.
- andrepd 3y agoSignal also fell over flat when the whatsapp outage happened a couple years ago. It's just difficult to handle spikes in demand.
- andrepd 3y agoYeah, the issue is more that there is substantial friction in paying any amount of money, especially in poorer countries with no access to e.g. banking or payment cards. I'm sure no one here, and few people even in comparatively poorer countries, would object if Signal/their messenger of choice cost 0.60$ per year to use. The problem is that making the service have a ~1$/yr price tag (as WhatsApp once had) is itself a barrier to a huge portion of the target audience.
- 3y ago
- teekert 3y agoWhatsapp got pretty big at 1 eur/year (iOS) and 1 eur for lifetime (Android) here in the netherlands. I do fear they'll loose most tech un-savvy users because they don't know how to pay (safely).
- wkat4242 3y agoThat doesn't mean they were actually profitable at those rates though. They could have been in growth hacking mode with venture backing.
- danielheath 3y agoThey were well-known for not doing that, though.
- wkat4242 3y agoHmm but then how did they manage before asking for that 1 euro? There were a whole lot of years where it was completely free (yes before the Facebook takeover). Here in Europe we've only needed to pay once or so until it got taken over. There must have been some kind of venture backing because there was no money coming in at all from users for a long time.
- danielheath 3y agoI looked further and you were pretty spot on! It ran a loss of 138 million in 2013 alone according to their SEC disclosures for that year.
- lencastre 3y agoIt’s beginning to sound like the 1 EUR/year that at some point WhatsApp wanted to charge and it seemed reasonable to me at the time. Signal is even better and even more so justified.
- rany_ 3y agoThey used to "require" a subscription of 1$/year but it was not enforced. If you missed the deadline, nothing happened. It was basically the WinRAR model but for an online service.
- politelemon 3y agoThat may have been an A/B testing of sorts then, because I was booted right away.
- rany_ 3y ago> whether you’ve been required to pay WhatsApp’s annual fee depends very much on when you joined the service, and even on what country you live in. Source: https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/ https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gwd 3y agoThis is kind of the number I was looking for -- "Cover your own costs: $1/year. Cover yourself and five other people: $5/year." I feel like something pointing out that the costs are around $1/year on signing up, maybe with a reminder once a year, would get most people self-funding pretty quickly.
- tobinfricke 3y agoReminds me of ... WhatsApp :D (Originally WhatsApp charged $1/year.)
- gwd 3y agoAnd I was SOOO happy when I heard WhatsApp's business model: Finally, I'M THE CUSTOMER! I gladly signed up for the "free year" and started getting other people to sign up for it... only to have it bought by FB, and never charged my $1 yearly fee. :-( Then I tried to get people to use Telegram, but hey never implemented encryption by default, instead implementing things like chatrooms with millions of people... then I signed up for Signal, but waited to see what would happen -- and they started doing some weird crypto thing. Thankfully that all seems to have not been an issue, so I might actually start recommending Signal.
- tobinfricke 3y agoYup. Same, re: WhatsApp and the $1 annual fee. It made so much sense "lightweight service, charge $1/year, have 1 billion customers." These days I use Signal mainly. But also WhatsApp. And Messenger. And SMS for folks who don't have any of the others. And my iPhone friends complain about how terrible it is to text Android-users, because iMessage. Oh I should add that it seems that college students these days have standardized on messaging through ... instagram.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Nemo_bis 3y agoWhatsApp in 2013 spent 148 M$/y with 400 MAU, or about 0.375 $/user-year. That's remarkably similar! https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=WhatsApp&oldid=1185099679#cite_ref-73 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=WhatsApp&oldid=11... (Small difference is that WhatsApp had a profitability of –93 %.)
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y agoI'm paying what works out to about 15 cents per "booking" in my app due to API fees. Maybe more,.. and I'm just now realizing we'll probably be losing money if people used their accounts to their limits. Like 500 bookings would cost me at least $75 but we charge about 50. Anyway $1/year is great
- goodpoint 3y agoVery reasonable with only 40 million users?! It's shockingly expensive.