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Signal’s president reveals the cost of running the privacy-preserving platform—not just to drum up donations, but to call out the for-profit surveillance business models it competes against.
The encrypted messaging and calling app Signal has become a one-of-a-kind phenomenon in the tech world: It has grown from the preferred encrypted messenger for the paranoid privacy elite into a legitimately mainstream service with hundreds of millions of installs worldwide. And it has done this entirely as a nonprofit effort, with no venture capital or monetization model, all while holding its own against the best-funded Silicon Valley competitors in the world, like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Gmail, and iMessage.
Today, Signal is revealing something about what it takes to pull that off—and it’s not cheap. For the first time, the Signal Foundation that runs the app has published a full breakdown of Signal’s operating costs: around $40 million this year, projected to hit $50 million by 2025.
Signal’s president, Meredith Whittaker, says her decision to publish the detailed cost numbers in a blog post for the first time—going well beyond the IRS disclosures legally required of nonprofits—was more than just as a frank appeal for year-end donations. By revealing the price of operating a modern communications service, she says, she wanted to call attention to how competitors pay these same expenses: either by profiting directly from monetizing users’ data or, she argues, by locking users into networks that very often operate with that same corporate surveillance business model.
“By being honest about these costs ourselves, we believe that helps provide a view of the engine of the tech industry, the surveillance business model, that is not always apparent to people,” Whittaker tells WIRED. Running a service like Signal—or WhatsApp or Gmail or Telegram—is, she says, “surprisingly expensive. You may not know that, and there’s a good reason you don’t know that, and it’s because it’s not something that companies who pay those expenses via surveillance want you to know.”
Signal pays $14 million a year in infrastructure costs, for instance, including the price of servers, bandwidth, and storage. It uses about 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. The biggest chunk of those infrastructure costs, fully $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. That cost has gone up, Signal says, as telecom firms charge more for those text messages in an effort to offset the shrinking use of SMS in favor of cheaper services like Signal and WhatsApp worldwide.
Another $19 million a year or so out of Signal’s budget pays for its staff. Signal now employs about 50 people, a far larger team than a few years ago. In 2016, Signal had just three full-time employees working in a single room in a coworking space in San Francisco. “People didn’t take vacations,” Whittaker says. “People didn’t get on planes because they didn’t want to be offline if there was an outage or something.” While that skeleton-crew era is over—Whittaker says it wasn’t sustainable for those few overworked staffers—she argues that a team of 50 people is still a tiny number compared to services with similar-sized user bases, which often have thousands of employees.
read more: https://www.wired.com/story/signal-operating-costs/
archive link: https://archive.ph/O5rzD
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Their leadership team made about 5 million dollars per year in 2022, with about $500K/year compensations for most of them. Some comments here suggest that those compensations have risen sharply recently.
Perhaps consider whether this is a good place to donate. And also, it’s so shitty that we were conditioned to think that every service is “free” of charge. In an ideal world, Signal could fix all of these problems by firing 80% of their C-team and instituting a modest subscription fee. But then 90% of their users would just fuck off to some place that is “free” but makes much more money from selling their data.
Their leadership team is not overpaid relative to the industry and they are highly deserved of those salaries. They make an excellent product. The point isn’t that the leadership team makes 5mil between them, a drop in the bucket of the 50mil total operating cost. It’s hard to read your comment as anything but disingenuous.
Jfc thank you this shit feels like astroturfing in favor of the major big techs like facebook
While I agree that they’re not being overpaid, 10% is a rather large drop in the bucket. Do they need that many to run an organization of 50 people, though? Perhaps they do, I don’t claim to know.
As a historical comparison, before selling out to Facebook, Whatsapp had 35 engineers, providing service to 450 million users. But perhaps they were selling their data at that point already, making this a bad comparison.
Yeah, and about that historical comparison… WhatsApp sold out for $21bn. Signals top earners collectively would have to work for 4200 years to get there.
Those guys deserve every cent of their paycheck, because probably any of them could easily earn multiple of that at another company… given their skills and knowledge in the field.
The biggest miracle is them not selling out.
Here’s the thing with pay: they can either pay these people or find someone who will accept less.
These employees have options. Signal is competing with other companies to hire them, so the pay is determined by that market.
As for the “free” part, yep, the consumer determines the value here, and since most people are pretty content with garbage like SMS or WhatsApp (which is monetized by your data), “free” is what Signal is competing with.
Fortunately, those of us “in the know” have the opportunity to promote a free app to help build the network effect, and we can financially contribute as part of that.
(Not criticizing, just adding perspective).
Shitting on a company’s shit pay strucute is reasonable, but you can’t ignore that this is always a choice between other options. Google and Apple are at least as bad in that regard, and they’re worse in other ways. Steps in the right direction are better than not doing anything because there’s no perfect option. When you do that, things get worse, because the companies will force you to take steps the wrong way.
Sounds completely fine.
Remember we need competent, motivated folks top to bottom. They are certainly getting offers from other organizations to go work for them.
We also don’t want them “needing” to accept bribes
Jim O’leary (Vp, Engineering) $666,909 $0 $33,343
Ehren Kret (Chief Technology Officer) $665,909 $0 $8,557
Aruna Harder (Chief Operating Officer) $444,606 $0 $20,500
Graeme Connell (Software Developer) $444,606 $0 $35,208
Greyson Parrelli (Software Developer) $422,972 $0 $35,668
Jonathan Chambers (Software Developer) $420,595 $0 $28,346
Meredith Whittaker (Director / Pres Of Signal Messenger) $191,229 $0 $6,032I don’t know why developers are making more than the president of the company here, but that’s nice to see.
Usually the person setting the wages is setting their own wage higher than the rest.
It’s also wild to me that some developers are making nearly half a million a year. I can’t even crack 100k in my local currency (about $75k/yr USD) and my job is to run the infrastructure. If I don’t do my job, the company goes offline and all that fancy programming amounts for nothing.
US tech wages are just nuts. In the UK I’m basically maxed out for a non-London based software dev at about £70k (~$87k). Meanwhile I have a friend who has managed to land a job with a London based US tech firm on about £120k (~$150k) which is massive for here but reading this is still a long way off what is possible.
You think wages are high here but forget that the USA has no healthcare, no mental healthcare, no social safety networks for if you lose your job, and suffers from overpriced food+housing just like everyone else.
You also get nickle and dime’d for literally everything, including having to tip if you eat out, tip to ride in an Uber, have food delivery, or exist. Drivers licenses cost money. Your birth certificate does. Your car insurance costs. If you can even afford an overpriced car even used.
And even if you get get healthcare through your job, it still sucks. You still pay “co pays” and “deductibles” just to receive care. If you get care at all that is - if the insurance company “decides” to cover your scan.
And you still owe whatever percentage after that insurance doesn’t cover. Say your important surgery is $100k in costs (yes they cost that much here often). Even with decent insurance you’re still owing thousands afterwards, more than likely depending on the insurance plan.
Forget getting an ambulance for emergencies. Even if your insurance covers it, it may be “out of the insurance network” and therefore not covered, but how could you know that? You’re unconscious. And you better tell your body not to get cancer either or into a serious accident, because that can run your medical bills into the millions.
The USA has no decent vacation time, has no required maternity leave or medical leave. You will eat your own childcare costs into the thousands, and some people’s partners opt to stay home rather than work to absorb those.
this i worked in an american company and many people move to europe and accept half the salary because its still better financially speaking.
I live in a country with Universal healthcare coverage (Canada) and we pay for our healthcare with income taxes and goods and services tax; so I fail to see why this should matter.
The key difference is a single payer system. We the people (represented by the government) can basically set the prices of our own healthcare procedures to a figure that is appropriate for how much each person helping to perform the procedure costs for their time and effort in the process, the costs of running the equipment, and some for the wear/tear/maintenance on that equipment. Whatever is left over goes towards replacing the machine at its end of life.
In the USA, hospitals are run as for-profit businesses, so the extra cost (usually 100% or more profit per procedure, or whatever they can get away with charging) is added on for the profit margin of the hospital, and the insurance companies and whatnot is also run as for-profit, jacking up prices even more.
It’s not that citizens of the US are paying for these procedures themselves that makes it expensive; Everyone pays for medical in some way, shape or form, just the USA seems to be okay with extorting its own citizens for profit in the process of helping them. It’s a toxic system that causes people to be forced into extreme poverty when they’re too poor to pay for insurance; which is insane to me, since you’re effectively beating the poors until they’re homeless and destitute then blaming them for their own homelessness and shunning them for being homeless when all they wanted to do was not be sick/injured.
The measure of a society is how it treats its weakest members.
For anyone wondering: First number is base, second is related, third is other. I have no clue what those terms mean.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840
My guess base is what is written in contract, related or other probably means bonuses or maybe overtime.
I have high hopes that the donation % and amount of users will grow after the interoperability implementation
40% of costs is salary? That’s so little for software company.
EDIT: oops, it’s not 19/50, it’s 19/40. 47.5% Still less than half.
$19M? With 50 employees, that’s an average salary of $380k/yr if my poor math skills are correct. Is that for real?
That’s assuming even pay distribution, which is obviously not the case anywhere.
Still, I hope the distribution isn’t terribly skewed, the developers absolutely deserve to be fairly compensated.
That’s about the price to compete for a software eng these days.
Factor benefit costs too.
And it’s the kind of product you don’t want a 80k developer to introduce security vulnerabilities left and right. You get what you pay for.
Security minded people are usually very skilled, and everyone’s competing to get them.
Could it be run cheaper? Yes probably. Would the product enshittify after a while? Absolutely yes.
I’m in the wrong field!
It’s a great field but super saturated right now. Not a good time to enter lol
More likely average developer salary and CEO takes couple of millions as a bonus every year, as they all do.
This is unfortunately almost definitely how it works.
After all, what kind of CEO can live with only having one yacht?
According to tax filings, they are not paying him a single dollar. Which is something am finding very suspicious. Especially considering he gave the company ~$100M for startup. But if it’s true, then it’s commendable. Person who has $100M in cash to shell out for a startup doesn’t need to worry about the money, it’s just that they often only care about that.
Bull. Shit.
What bullshit? Entry level sde 1 at Amazon is 176k. A senior with around 4 to 5 years of experience is 359k.
E5 at Facebook is 412k. Levels.fyi has all the stats.
Like if you’re a company competing against these companies for talent that’s what you gotta pay. During the pandemic it was even worse with people getting like 20-40k sign on bonuses etc too.
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I mean citation needed… Levels.fyi. It literally lifts all the major tech company salaries and stock breakdown.
Also I was a hiring manager that competed against these companies during the pandemic. I know the salaries lol.
I mean, multiple places online saying literally less than half that at the high end. Also, I could see a few making that much I guess but all 50 employees?
All 50 no. But some could be making more than that. Plus benefit costs alone.
I also dunno signal itself. There’s no leveling info or there. According to blind posts asking about the tc I quote.
“Work at signal currently and can say the pay is competitive. There’s no equity given it’s a nonprofit but there are many benefits that add up very quickly. Maxed out 401k match, which is ~$20k right there every year, as an example. As a nonprofit you can look at the 990 (I think the most updated one is from 2019 on propublica) that shows salaries for certain employees.”
Reading other posts base salary goes up to 250k.
They don’t give equity so maybe benefits being factored in.
That’s not terribly awful actually.
If they are wanting to attract programers with experience and not have them sniped.
Fresh out of school in that field with no experience, one can hit $75k-$120k fairly easily.
Signal needs people who are familiar with encryption and cyber security, and are basically inventing new ways to did things in order to mantain user privacy. That is a very specific niche that takes a lot of skill and experience to do.
Where are new grads making >75k (USD)? I made 50k CAD out of school, got a couple raises and now at 65…
US.
Average starting salary at my school is $68k, my department is $74k average, and I have friends who have started at $110k and had their MS degree paid for on top of that, with a pay bump after their degree.
I turned down $80k starting in a really low CoL area cause they didnt have a big enough moving allowance, and I have a few other options I’m pursuing that are more appealing to me.
Different countries, vastly different pay scales.
Made 75k out of a 12 week coding bootcamp. Didn’t go to school, but worked as a mechanic for about five years before that.
Damn you are me from the past, except I don’t have a degree. The pay is much worse up here. I’ve considered trying to get work down south to make some $ but the US is kind of a shit show right now and I don’t want to live in a car dependent city.
You aren’t accounting for overhead (taxes that aren’t listed on an employee paystub, insurance, benefits, training, etc.)
The advertised salaries are closer to a 150-200k average which is pretty ordinary.
Oops, it’s 7.5 percent more. Anyway. Article summary says 40M is total operation cost including 19M in wages.
I’m dead serious wtf is signal? It’s like texting but all texting apps just go through it? Or something?
Signal is a chat app. It uses phone numbers for identity verification and friend discovery but messages go over an end-to-end encrypted protocol. While open source, it uses a centralized network and a single client.
It’s somewhere between Matrix and WhatsApp. Open Source and friendly, but still centralized and anchored to phone numbers.
Open Whisper Systems (Open Whisper)
Signal was launched by now-defunct Open Whisper Systems (OWS) in 2013, brainchild of shadowy tech guru ‘Moxie Marlinspike’ – real name Matthew Rosenfeld. In February 2018, responsibility for managing the app passed to the nonprofit Signal Foundation, launched with $50 million in startup capital provided by billionaire former Facebook higher-up Brian Acton, the Foundation’s executive chair
Huawei engineer exposed SIGNAL has CIA backdoor — Please do not use SIGNAL has been subverted *
WikiLeaks Says the CIA Can “Bypass” Secure Messaging Apps Like Signal. What Does That Mean? *
The fast-growing encrypted messaging app is making itself increasingly vulnerable to abuse. Current and former employees are sounding the alarm *
The CIA and Signals Intelligence *
Get Session, the FOSS fork of Signal, from former employees at Signal
I know what the counter arguments are all gonna be, I live and breate security. The fact is much of this is outside our inspection. We cannot audit the internal Signal network or it’s code. If something comes across as possibly sketchy when deaing with security and privacy, for all intents and purposes it is sketchy and cannot be trusted.
When in doubt, personalize the situation. You have a babysitter. You heard sketchy things and saw some low grade sketchy stuff. What do you do? You boot immediately, right?
Do not try to convince yourself of something you cannot without hard evidence.
You’re welcome.
Read the 1st comment under 1st link, 2nd link os about something different, 4th links is about something absolutely different. **
Is the original fishy comment some kind of bot generated counter intelligence?
I especially love how even the first few paragraphs of the second link make it clear that it’s not a problem with Signal.
Eventually they’re going to cave into having some paid model. Like all good things we once held dear, the long arm of monetary reliance shows no pity or remorse in it’s wake.
If they do I think they should leave messaging free and create some Premium Signal subscription to get voice calls and video calls.
I don’t want to pay for this major bandwidth usage even though I have never done a single secure phone call.
I cannot understand how they can use so much bandwidth and I have to assume the vast majority of it is for voice and video.
Wikipedia?
I’ve been using signal since forever. Recently when there was a big exodus from Whatsapp because of their changed data policies was the first time I felt an impact with response time in the app etc. I immediately set up a regular donation. A few months later they came out with there cryptocurrency scheme I decided I won’t be funding any cryptocurrency so I cancelled my donations. I trust signal on the technical side implicitly. But they have lost my trust in the business side :/
Am kind of annoyed at the fact they go out and say they need more money to keep working on it, while at the same time keep doing features people don’t want. My entire contact list asked me how to disable stories the very moment they were released. Then they added crypto, and payments and whatnot. All while people are repeating they want username based accounts and editing features. Video calls in Signal still doesn’t have add person to call. You are simply not able to have a group call with people without creating a group first. But sure as hell we have crypto.
The crypto highly annoys me too and I was against it, but we can turn it off and nothing changes which is good. I still believe the dev time should have gone elsewhere. But I’m not as bothered as I was in the begining. Same with stories, never used it before signal in other platforms and had to study wtf they were when it appeared on signal. Now I can see and understand a bit of the use case but I have never seen any of my dozens of friends that use signal use that feature. Still something that can be turned off. I’ve used it to share memes.
Anyway, they claimed heavily that there were markets that would absolutely require that feature since people are used to it in other chat platforms, and if it really brings people to a better platform that is signal I’m ok with it. What I’d really like to see is if the claim now holds true or not and understand if the dev and money time spent in those features really got more users in the app or not and if it was worth the cost vs other features.
Lost me (and many family members) when they dropped support for SMS.
And yes, I will keep on bringing that up on every topic about Signal.
This was a bad move and I’m sure Signal has been bleeding their userbase ever since they have done it.
Their user base has grown tremendously since they dropped support for SMS. Just read the article.
Same here. It was basically the only way to convince non technical users to use it. It’s a better texting client than the default Android messages app.
Du the average signal staffer makes 380k?
Yeah that struck me too. 20 million divided by 50 employees is 400 000 each. That is a LOT of money. Even half that (twice the employees, or half the cost) would be a lot.
I don’t know what’s the ratio in the USA but you may divide it by close to 2 to get the employee pay considering all kind of salary taxes. Then imagine the cost of San Francisco engineers able to build a global app used by a hundred million users. It doesn’t sound crazy.
Signal’s CEO salary is $5.7M, not sure about the other execs salary, but we probably can speculate that the execs compensation is half of total salary expense, so those 50 rank and file employees probably cost 200k in salary and benefits instead of 400k.Where is this $5.7M coming from? According to their tax filings in 2022, they paid their CEO $0: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840 (compensation section)
You’re right, I think I googled wrong company name there.
If you take out the employer-side taxes and cost of benefits, maybe. A fair number of their employees must be software engineers, and that much compensation isn’t unreasonable for expert software engineers.
It says “pays for” not “pays to”. So benefits, travel/relocation, training, etc, is included.
The average is then brought up by the higher level staff getting paid more.
So for a Mountain View CA company each staffer making ~$200k wouldn’t surprise me
Can we really call a business nonprofit if they pay their CEO 5.7 million a year? Over 10% of operating costs going to one employee? That’s fucking insaneEdit - incorrect information
The most secure and privacy respecting chat app doesn’t develop and run itself.
CISO and developers in that field earn into the millions, and Signal is competing with the top dogs here (MANGA). There pay is ridiculously modest.
Even if this were accurate, what they pay a CEO is a function of the “CEO Marketplace”, i.e. what other companies are paying CEOs, as those are the companies they’re competing against to get talent.
Where’s that number from? I see her as a little under $200k.
They are paying their CEO $0. Brian Acton, previously founder of WhatsApp, the guy who initially bankrolled the whole non-profit by a $50 million, 50 year, non-secured, 0% interst loan, later giving even more.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Foundation#History
They pay some other C levels 400-600k. Source: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840 (compensation section)
A bit more than $50M
Yeah I have to ask for a credible source on that one.
They say 19 mil a year on 50 people - that’s like 380k per person for a non for profit… That number seems a little high surely?
Im not sure I can afford that
I’ve never heard of this before
We need a lemmy version of signal
There’s application called Session, which is essentially forked Signal, but doesn’t rely on servers or phone numbers. Instead it uses Tor network and is decentralized. It’s kind of annoying though considering adding people to your contact list, you have to scan their id. Increased security but it goes to show why Signal opted for phone numbers.
Instead it uses Tor network […]
Are you sure? Do they use that alongside the weird blockchain backend they had going, or switch over at some point? I remember looking into Session awhile ago but I wrote it off because of the blockchain/cryptocurrency shenanigans involved in the architecture.
As I recall part of the idea was that the cryptocurrency would serve as a sort of incentive for people to run nodes for the Session network to operate.
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That’s Matrix. End to end encrypted, decentralized, and open source.
Bridging opens it up to other services as well, like how Pidgin/Adium/Gaim used to work.
No, we need a lemmy version of chaturbate.
I mean, there is already matrix. But does there is already a cammodelling federated tools ?
No, so stop reinventing the wheel, and let’s make something new and original.
You know what, that’s fair.
I saw a lot of discussion in the comments about their workers pay, but honestly, they make a great product. Wouldn’t wanna be counting pennies in someone elses pockets. I donated a one time 25 bucks, I hope they will continue to ask for donations whenever they are in dire need of server running money.
19M a year for 50 people ? that would be 380.000/person. Surely there’s an error here somewhere lol Unless we’re talking rupees
C*Os probably eat a la4ge portion of it. Not even breaching into VPs and Senior Managers
Well there it is, they can make savings easily afaic
It’s not exclusively peer to peer, so there must be infrastructure, no?
nah they say 19m is for their almost 50 employees. 14m is infrastructure, 6m of which is for texts to confirm, apparently. Which also… seems like way too much? 6 million for text messages? Are they confirming 390 million new accounts a year? Quick google says its .79 cents a text. 2x that to receive also and… yeah… I’m pretty sure that ain’t right. Like I get the 8 mil a year for data, cuz yeah it is a lot. Texts should probably be 1m assuming 50mil new accounts a year. I could see 10m for the 50 people, that is $200,000 on average. So… half what they claim seems reasonable.
Are you including the office space/associated costs with employing someone as well? I was once told it costs approx 100k to have me in my seat before the cost of my salary was accounted for, not sure how much BS that was, but 100k was multiples of my salary at the time.
I mean, I could see them trying to say costs for buying land and building shit and furnishing and etc. sure, but again this is YEARLY costs, not startup costs. I do assume there is some of that included in the budget but its not listed anywhere. I mean I GUESS that could be listed under budget for staff but that seems… very disingenuous.
Wages themselves are not the full cost of an employees total payroll expense, since that would also include taxes and benefits. And then you have to figure their expenditure for business equipment (work computer, phone, printer, etc), licenses for job-specific software they use, total cost of the square-footage of office space they need, etc.
You could say office space and furniture and even IT infrastructure are sunk costs but they do need to be constantly maintained and expanded upon as the company grows. Adding a person to the payroll means the company has grown. They may not need a bigger office, or more servers, until they hire a few more people, but then at that point they will need it.
Things like health insurance, etc. are yearly costs though and that stuff does end up adding up. There should also be some recurring taxes that an employer has to pay per employee that aren’t part of income tax withholding (i.e. doesn’t show up as part of an employee’s paystub).
Probably for renting office space, security, catering, training, employee benefits, and things like that. I’d imagine costs like that balloon up quickly.
Plus there’s likely background checks for potential hires, onboarding and interviewing, these all have costs too since they have to be selective of who they hire, since that person will then be working on one of the most secure messaging platforms in the world.
Also, as for the costs of texts, a significant part of that would be the costs associated with sending push notifications. I remember a while back, when I had an iphone and used Apollo for Reddit, the developer of the app explored every option but eventually settled on a paid subscription system, just to enable push notifications for the app. There was no other way since for the users of Apollo alone, the cost of sending push notifications every time you got a reply or message was surprisingly high.
That was just on iOS, add Android to that plus Signal’s clients on other platforms, I’d imagine that the bandwidth to send notifications probably costs Signal a lot since people tend to have conversation prompting multiple notifications on their device.
I could be wrong but that would be my guess as to why the costs are, what they are.
Ah the push notifications makes a lot of sense, the article said that was just for SMS messages to confirm messages and that seemed way too much, but push notifications is probably right.
And yeah, I guess I assumed most of those costs wouldn’t be labelled staff budget, but idk I’m not an accountant lol. Still that seems to be a lot for 50 people yearly.
If signal is run by 50 people, I have a pretty good hunch that the majority of them are very well paid developers and engineers, and IT…and a rather small amount of lower-paid administrative staff.
Keep in mind that they need to be able to send SMS worldwide and roaming is a thing. Especially if you have to deal prices with all the telco in the world
Could be that that is employee headcount and not including contractors.
Good. People creating useful non-profit services should be paid a lot. And according to their financial reports (somebody linked in another comment) it’s not biased towards executive pay.
As long as it doesn’t end up eventually bringing down the entire service.
Yeah, that seems shady at least, what kind of salaries are they getting?
Where I live in europe, IT people usually hace salaries between 30.000 and 80.000. And it is considered a pretty good salary.
If all the employees are located in the highest cost of living area in the world, it kinda makes sense.
Gotta pay those insane housing costs somehow.
Just over a dollar a user doesn’t sound that bad.
I suspect if they run short of money to run it, they’d add some Discord style features. Better quality voice and video sounds like an easy one to get users of it to pony up for.
Although again, I’d prefer a federated alternative. We shouldn’t be hanging large portions of infrastructure on a handful of companies that at any point can pull the rug.
Someone mentioned above but we have that in Matrix. A great federated messaging service.
