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Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive (signal.org)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago (19 children)

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

[...]

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (9 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

[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago (6 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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months 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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