The Signal messenger and protocol.

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Running Signal Will Soon Cost $50 Million a Year (www.wired.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Signal’s operating costs: around $40 million this year

$14 million a year in infrastructure costs

$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

$19 million a year or so out of Signal’s budget pays for its staff. Signal now employs about 50 people

Staff budget seem crazy high with about 50 people. That's an average of $31.666 per month per employee.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

These guys are way smarter than me and have clearly thought about this, but 15% of your operating costs seems wildly high for verifying phone numbers.

[–] gilbert31 7 points 1 year ago

It's all explained in the document, basically the telecom companies realized that people do not send SMS anymore and that the value of them lies now on the companies that need to send you verification texts and other automated messages, as a consequence, they inflated the cost of those to extract as much money as they can. The document also describes fraudsters that register numbers en masse to drive SMS traffic on a particular network and then make money of the fees.

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