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Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive (signal.org)
submitted 2 years ago* by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.

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[–] 32 points 2 years ago (4 children)

In total, around 50 full-time employees currently work on Signal

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When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.

That's 380k/employee on average. Even if half of that went to taxes and other expenses, on average they're paying their employees around 190k/year.

Bro, as a European dev, that's triple my salary! They could possibly double or triple their workforce if they hired from outside of the US.

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  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    When running a business, you need to budget 3x salary for actual TCO of a staff member:

    1x covers their direct salary 2x covers retirement fund, electricity, office space, and infrastructure items unlike server and laptops for corporate use etc.

    The 3x multiplier is for when you're a services company, and that represents a possibly profit margin.

    So for signal, your $380k becomes $190k which in my experience is average for a US tech sw dev at a mid to early senior level.

    I donate to signal monthly and I have no problems with the costs they're posting. I work in SV tech and I've seen 20x worse numbers.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I’m extremely curious where you get those numbers from, I operate businesses and that doesn’t pass the sniff test.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    I've used the 3x multiplier for staff planning at services companies since the early 2000s.

    Perhaps there are regional differences, but they've rung true for planning billable rates of return at every services company I've worked at in the last 20 years here in AU.

    I realise that the services aspect isn't relevant, but having the sum of indirect staff costs equivalent to staff salary cost when office space is involved isn't a massive stretch in my experience. (Indirect costs would include office rent, utilities, infrastructure and a share of shared functions such as IT, HR, facilities etc...)

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    3x is too much tbh. It's more like 2x in total, at least going by european points of view - I don't know what would make the US more expensive though with even less welfare. And office space in these days is a diminishing cost of course with all the hybrid/remote options. Laptops cost is pretty negligible. I think Signal does have a lot of hosting costs though.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    As an American dev, you should check out other silicon valley salaries. After hearing what some folks there make 190k doesn't make me bat an eye.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    True, but Signal is choosing to hire such people. There's talent all over the world and all over the US. There's absolutely no need to only hire people from one highly expensive region.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I don't care if employees are well paid. I do care that Signal takes 50 employees to operate. What are they all doing? This is a genuine question

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  • [–] 28 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    You did not read the article, did you?

    This is a lot of work, and we do it with a small and mighty team. In total, around 50 full-time employees currently work on Signal, a number that is shockingly small by industry standards. For example, LINE Corporation, the developers of the LINE messaging app popular in Japan, has around 3,100 employees, while the division of Kakao Corp that develops KakaoTalk, a messaging app popular in Korea, has around 4,000 employees. Employee counts at bigger corporations like Malus, Meta, and Google’s parent company (Alphabet) are much, much higher.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    I can't speak for LINE - But Kakao does a heck of a lot more than messaging; it's one of the top companies to work for and the defacto app of Korea. It's used for taxis, webtoons, payments, music streaming, banking, social media, OAuth, etc (and that's on top of all its failed ventures no one uses). So yeah, it makes sense to have a lot more employees. Getting into Kakao is like getting into Google or Apple in the West.

    It also doesn't explain why Signal has 50. Signal is open source, but openly hostile to forks which throttles its development. So I wonder, what are those 50 employees doing? I genuinely would like to see a breakdown

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago*

    Yeah it's the hostility to forks and federation I genuinely don't like. Federation is important, and forks are important so I can use the service as I wish, not as they wish me to.

    Of course it's a market and I can vote with my feet and I have. I just linked it to Matrix for availability but I don't actively use it from my end. And I have a grand total of 1 person regularly communicating with me through it :P Versus about 50 on whatsapp and another 50 on telegram (not to mention the countless telegram groups I'm in). But they all end up in one and the same matrix for me <3

    Self-hosting all these bridges used to be a royal PITA but there's some very kind people that made this amazing ansible playbook that takes care of it all now.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    Worth mentioning, as someone has for Kakao below, the LINE app has a magnitude or two or three more features than Signal. Beyond chat, the app handles payments including retail via QR, effectively has Instagram and TikTok built in, has an entire news section, and much more.

    Heck, LINE the company even has permanent and pop-up merchandise stores in downtown Tokyo (Harajuku) and their own MVNO mobile carrier called LINE Mobile.

    Now that said, I loathe LINE, the app. The UX is poor and the app is bloated behind belief. Only use it effectively out of necessity as someone living in Japan. The only alternative communications channel even remotely close in usage is probably Instagram chat.

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  • [–] 25 points 2 years ago

    When Whatsapp was sold to Facebook in 2014, they had 55 employees. Considering the app had considerably less features and did not focus so heavily on encryption and privacy, Signal can be considered even leaner than Whatsapp.

    Now, for the actual breakdown, they have at least the following technical teams: desktop, android, iOS, server, calls (ringrtc), core (libsignal). If we assume a team has usually 5 people (manager, Sr SWE, Jr SWE, QA, maybe PM), that's already 30 people. On top of that, they have an in house support team (don't know the size but I wouldn't be surprised if they have 10ppl on the payroll considering the number of signal users) and management (CEO, CTO, CSO, VP), which will quickly add up to around 50.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    That is indeed a lot. They must have most of these in Silicon Valley.

    However it is their choice to do so. They don't have to be in the most expensive place in the world for developers.

    I prefer sponsoring matrix though as it's really open. Signal is just a slightly nicer walled garden. Also, Matrix doesn't need to be linked to my mobile number which is a godsend because I tend to change those once in a while and it's a real nightmare bringing all whatsapp contacts over.

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