> Servers: $2.9 million dollars per year.
> Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year.
> Total Bandwidth: $2.8 million dollars per year.
> Additional Services: $700,000 dollars per year.
Signal pays more for delivering verification SMS during sign-up, than for all other infrastructure (except traffic) combined. Wow, that sounds excessive.
That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use iMessage.
There are opensource self hosted solutions like BlueBubble that allow reasonably secure communication through iMessage to the other chat platforms on desktop/Android etc. I have zero affiliation, but I know others who happily use it. There are also less secure and paid solutions I can't speak to.