5 ms·

Some of these things raise an eyebrow and I'd like them further broken down (but in the mean time, I'm still donating): * $19 million for 50 staff - That's

Some of these things raise an eyebrow and I'd like them further broken down (but in the mean time, I'm still donating): * $19 million for 50 staff - That's $338k/head on average. At face value for a nonprofit, I'd like these costs broke down as this seems excessive. There is far cheaper IT labor available outside SV. * 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 - I'd drop these features if possible, or give them to donors. * Storage: $1.3m, Servers: $2.9m - I was actually expecting this to be far higher - Long term storage should probably be donor-only - Servers could likely be optimized by going hybrid cloud with colocation and owning own hardware, but again, was surprised how "little" they're spending on this. * Sms registration fees: $6m - Stop contributing and supporting the "Your phone number is your identity" problem. - Move towards helping educating society and establishing a set of encryption keys as their long term identity It's easy to criticize from the bleachers. Still thankful for the app and I'll continue to donate.

simcop2387 3y ago
One thing I question with that is that if you gave features to donors only, wouldn't that mean that signal now needs to track users in ways that aren't privacy preserving? I.e. you'd be able to know if any given user using signal now has given payments to signal. I'm not sure that'd work with what they want to do as an organization.
asylteltine 3y ago
They need to dump sms entirely. Use on device private keys. If users mess it up, it’s on them. People need to get educated about how to manage private keys.
- vore 3y ago
  As someone technically savvy, I don't trust myself to manage my own private keys sufficiently for a service that's the point of contact for all my friends and family. I think it's a much taller order for someone without the technical knowhow – remember that Signal's audience includes very non-technical people who don't have time to learn the technical ins and outs but absolutely require its utility, like journalists and dissidents.
- a_vanderbilt 3y ago
  Then few will use it and Signal will die. There is this gap between the ideals of the technically-minded and the reality that users live in. They tried to dump SMS - and people responded by not using alternatives. The entire sales pitch of Signal is that it is easy and unobtrusive.
mushufasa 3y ago
It's easy to say that "you should do x" from the bleachers but when you're in the arena you run up against reality. For example, Signal had a blog a while ago about how they tried to avoid the sms features, actually for privacy reasons, but they found people just didn't use other alternatives. Here's a reddit thread of users advocating for SMS support https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/y3ymfl/keep_sms_support/ https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/y3ymfl/keep_sms_sup... . So it was the best of all the available options practically, if they wanted to grow and retain the users.
- bpfrh 3y ago
  That was for sending SMS via Signal, not for verifiyng users via sms and they did remove that. https://signal.org/blog/sms-removal-android/ https://signal.org/blog/sms-removal-android/ edit: wording, forgot the word remove
vore 3y ago
- That's $338k/head on average. At face value for a nonprofit, I'd like these costs broke down as this seems excessive. There is far cheaper IT labor available outside SV. You get what you pay for, though. $338k/year seems like a reasonable salary for people working on something as privacy critical as Signal – just because you're working for a nonprofit doesn't mean you have to work for less competitive wages.
- jallen_dot_dev 3y ago
  Also, employees cost more than just their salary.
  - foobarian 3y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if overhead turned out 1/3 of that figure.
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  > $338k/year seems like a reasonable salary for people That $19M/year was total employee costs which, as best I understand these things, can often work out to be double the raw salaries which would bring the average down to a slightly less excessive $170k/year.
- superfrank 3y ago
  IIRC, employees cost the business ~150% of their salary. That means we're looking at more like a $220k/yr salary on average. For a bay area company, that seems completely reasonable.
- eschulz 3y ago
  Nonprofits, as with for-profits, must pay competitive wages or they will have trouble getting the expertise that they need. $338k/head seems reasonable when you also consider taxes the company must pay for each employee.
- raesene9 3y ago
  Whilst competitive salaries are important, it's fair to say that, outside of the US, you can get good people for a lot less than $338k/year. To give one example of a (not that cheap) market, outside of London average developer salaries are probably under $50k in the UK. Even accounting for additional costs like taxation and equipment, that's likely to be under $100k fully loaded.
yieldcrv 3y ago
costs for a nonprofit are the same as costs for a forprofit there’s just a bunch of nonprofit employees or personnel that play on the pauper perception because its convenient, but “nonprofit” and no money is not correlated to anything so if those employee costs were excessive for any organization, saying non profit doesn’t make them more or less excessive I think tech talent is undervalued and should at least compete directly with FAANG, for many organizations this is not possible, for organizations with other liquid assets they create (like Signal) it is possible. All employment hasnt risen with cost of living, I’m not familiar with other sectors.
Canada 3y ago
> That's $338k/head on average. Oh come on. Just because the organization is non-profit, meaning that it's not out to make a profit for shareholders, is no justification for the staff to be paid below their market worth. In fact, they could definitely earn more by quitting and working at for profit companies. And that is especially true for those who are getting the higher end of the compensation. And say that staff number was like, $5m/year less? It doesn't change the fact that costs of running are substantial and more donation is needed from those who want it to remain viable.
darth_avocado 3y ago
> far cheaper IT labor outside This is a product that solves some of the harder problems of engineering, and has a staff of 50. Cheaper isn’t going to get you the best. If you had a staff of 1000, you could make that argument. Besides that’s not a lot of money to begin with. 340k is a senior engineer salary and I am sure the people running the company are far more capable than senior engineers. > drop those features That’s a valid argument, but 1.7M for that 20PB of bandwidth is not a lot of money. Dropping or making the features paid, defeats the purpose. If you’re trying to be the privacy first app that competes with WhatsApp and others, this would make it harder to be a viable alternative. > sms registration fees Education is a harder problem to solve, but offloading some of the costs to users may make sense here.
davidhyde 3y ago
< "* 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 - I'd drop these features if possible, or give them to donors." How about they pull their socks up and use peer to peer technology instead? Messages are asynchronous so they need to be temporarily stored but routing real-time audio and video is a technology problem that they have chosen the expensive way to solve.
- NOWHERE_ 3y ago
  If signal adds username only accounts it makes sense to relay calls if users don’t want their IP leaked to the other person.
- contact9879 3y ago
  They are peer-to-peer by default between people in their contacts list. That is for when calling someone that isn't in your contacts list or for people that have enabled the relay all calls option.
  - davidhyde 3y ago
    Thanks, very interesting. IMO, that is an insane amount of money to pay for a non-default feature of a free product.
yt-sdb 3y ago
> $19 million for 50 staff. That's $338k/head on average. How did you compute this? 19/5 is 3.8
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> I'd drop these features if possible, or give them to donors. They can't really do that, it deters adoption of something with a network effect. The real issue here is that direct connections have privacy implications (maybe you don't want the other party to know your IP address), so they relay everything. If they could solve that they could save a lot of money. For example, detect if the user is connected via a known VPN service (which is likely given Signal's user base) and then let the VPN hide the user's IP address instead of Signal having to pay for it. Or make a deal with popular VPNs to put the relay servers in their data centers, which gives a similar advantage and they might be able to get better pricing from them in general because the VPNs already have a lot of bandwidth, are sympathetic to what Signal does and could use it as PR.
- olejorgenb 3y ago
  Making it so that only one party need to have a pro account might help a bit
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    Still doesn't work. Any two people don't have a pro account and they stop using it in favor of a competitor, and then their other contacts use the competitor too. You can't charge for something WhatsApp has for free.

simcop2387 3y ago

One thing I question with that is that if you gave features to donors only, wouldn't that mean that signal now needs to track users in ways that aren't privacy preserving? I.e. you'd be able to know if any given user using signal now has given payments to signal. I'm not sure that'd work with what they want to do as an organization.

asylteltine 3y ago

They need to dump sms entirely. Use on device private keys. If users mess it up, it’s on them. People need to get educated about how to manage private keys.

vore 3y ago
As someone technically savvy, I don't trust myself to manage my own private keys sufficiently for a service that's the point of contact for all my friends and family. I think it's a much taller order for someone without the technical knowhow – remember that Signal's audience includes very non-technical people who don't have time to learn the technical ins and outs but absolutely require its utility, like journalists and dissidents.
a_vanderbilt 3y ago
Then few will use it and Signal will die. There is this gap between the ideals of the technically-minded and the reality that users live in. They tried to dump SMS - and people responded by not using alternatives. The entire sales pitch of Signal is that it is easy and unobtrusive.

mushufasa 3y ago

It's easy to say that "you should do x" from the bleachers but when you're in the arena you run up against reality. For example, Signal had a blog a while ago about how they tried to avoid the sms features, actually for privacy reasons, but they found people just didn't use other alternatives. Here's a reddit thread of users advocating for SMS support https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/y3ymfl/keep_sms_support/ https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/y3ymfl/keep_sms_sup... . So it was the best of all the available options practically, if they wanted to grow and retain the users.

bpfrh 3y ago
That was for sending SMS via Signal, not for verifiyng users via sms and they did remove that. https://signal.org/blog/sms-removal-android/ https://signal.org/blog/sms-removal-android/ edit: wording, forgot the word remove

vore 3y ago

- That's $338k/head on average. At face value for a nonprofit, I'd like these costs broke down as this seems excessive. There is far cheaper IT labor available outside SV. You get what you pay for, though. $338k/year seems like a reasonable salary for people working on something as privacy critical as Signal – just because you're working for a nonprofit doesn't mean you have to work for less competitive wages.

jallen_dot_dev 3y ago
Also, employees cost more than just their salary.
- foobarian 3y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if overhead turned out 1/3 of that figure.
zimpenfish 3y ago
> $338k/year seems like a reasonable salary for people That $19M/year was total employee costs which, as best I understand these things, can often work out to be double the raw salaries which would bring the average down to a slightly less excessive $170k/year.
superfrank 3y ago
IIRC, employees cost the business ~150% of their salary. That means we're looking at more like a $220k/yr salary on average. For a bay area company, that seems completely reasonable.
eschulz 3y ago
Nonprofits, as with for-profits, must pay competitive wages or they will have trouble getting the expertise that they need. $338k/head seems reasonable when you also consider taxes the company must pay for each employee.
raesene9 3y ago
Whilst competitive salaries are important, it's fair to say that, outside of the US, you can get good people for a lot less than $338k/year. To give one example of a (not that cheap) market, outside of London average developer salaries are probably under $50k in the UK. Even accounting for additional costs like taxation and equipment, that's likely to be under $100k fully loaded.

yieldcrv 3y ago

costs for a nonprofit are the same as costs for a forprofit there’s just a bunch of nonprofit employees or personnel that play on the pauper perception because its convenient, but “nonprofit” and no money is not correlated to anything so if those employee costs were excessive for any organization, saying non profit doesn’t make them more or less excessive I think tech talent is undervalued and should at least compete directly with FAANG, for many organizations this is not possible, for organizations with other liquid assets they create (like Signal) it is possible. All employment hasnt risen with cost of living, I’m not familiar with other sectors.

Canada 3y ago

> That's $338k/head on average. Oh come on. Just because the organization is non-profit, meaning that it's not out to make a profit for shareholders, is no justification for the staff to be paid below their market worth. In fact, they could definitely earn more by quitting and working at for profit companies. And that is especially true for those who are getting the higher end of the compensation. And say that staff number was like, $5m/year less? It doesn't change the fact that costs of running are substantial and more donation is needed from those who want it to remain viable.

darth_avocado 3y ago

> far cheaper IT labor outside This is a product that solves some of the harder problems of engineering, and has a staff of 50. Cheaper isn’t going to get you the best. If you had a staff of 1000, you could make that argument. Besides that’s not a lot of money to begin with. 340k is a senior engineer salary and I am sure the people running the company are far more capable than senior engineers. > drop those features That’s a valid argument, but 1.7M for that 20PB of bandwidth is not a lot of money. Dropping or making the features paid, defeats the purpose. If you’re trying to be the privacy first app that competes with WhatsApp and others, this would make it harder to be a viable alternative. > sms registration fees Education is a harder problem to solve, but offloading some of the costs to users may make sense here.

davidhyde 3y ago

< "* 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 - I'd drop these features if possible, or give them to donors." How about they pull their socks up and use peer to peer technology instead? Messages are asynchronous so they need to be temporarily stored but routing real-time audio and video is a technology problem that they have chosen the expensive way to solve.

NOWHERE_ 3y ago
If signal adds username only accounts it makes sense to relay calls if users don’t want their IP leaked to the other person.
contact9879 3y ago
They are peer-to-peer by default between people in their contacts list. That is for when calling someone that isn't in your contacts list or for people that have enabled the relay all calls option.
- davidhyde 3y ago
  Thanks, very interesting. IMO, that is an insane amount of money to pay for a non-default feature of a free product.

yt-sdb 3y ago

> $19 million for 50 staff. That's $338k/head on average. How did you compute this? 19/5 is 3.8

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> I'd drop these features if possible, or give them to donors. They can't really do that, it deters adoption of something with a network effect. The real issue here is that direct connections have privacy implications (maybe you don't want the other party to know your IP address), so they relay everything. If they could solve that they could save a lot of money. For example, detect if the user is connected via a known VPN service (which is likely given Signal's user base) and then let the VPN hide the user's IP address instead of Signal having to pay for it. Or make a deal with popular VPNs to put the relay servers in their data centers, which gives a similar advantage and they might be able to get better pricing from them in general because the VPNs already have a lot of bandwidth, are sympathetic to what Signal does and could use it as PR.

olejorgenb 3y ago
Making it so that only one party need to have a pro account might help a bit
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  Still doesn't work. Any two people don't have a pro account and they stop using it in favor of a competitor, and then their other contacts use the competitor too. You can't charge for something WhatsApp has for free.