this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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The Signal messenger and protocol.

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https://signal.org/

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Running Signal Will Soon Cost $50 Million a Year (www.wired.com)
submitted 1 year ago by celmit@lemmy.ca to c/signal@lemmy.ml
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[–] Chup@feddit.de 32 points 1 year ago (4 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.

[–] deezbutts@lemm.ee 16 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@lemmy.world 5 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.

[–] Tikiporch@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

I had a staff of 16 mid-level technicians and payroll was about 4 million. Benefits and other crap that didn't end up on the paycheck are included in payroll.

[–] solarvector@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 year ago

Still might be high, but if that's budget #s, the employee pay is much lower after taking into about related overhead.

Like HanDman said, hopefully it's not all going to the top handful.

[–] HanDman@infosec.pub 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In all likelihood a lot of that goes to the top 5 of those 50. If I’m wrong… good.

[–] breadsmasher@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] Tavarin@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

Adding up the 7 listed employees there is about $3.5 million, leaving $15.5 million for the remaining 47 employees, giving an average of $360,000 a year per employee. Damn good wage.