zlacker

>>mikece+(OP)
> Storage: $1.3 million dollars per year.

> 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.

>>Duneda+Z
> we can rent server infrastructure from a variety of providers like Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure

Moving off cloud services to lower-cost provider like Hetzner, Vultr and DigitalOcean might provide a lot of cost savings.

I also imagine they're using managed SMS services from one of these clouds, and moving off them to a combination of local SMS gateways in each country can also further reduce costs (and in one case I've personally observed, by upto two orders of magnitude). This obviously pushes a lot of complexity on Signal's side, but is usually worth it.

>>supriy+y7
Any idea what prevents Signal from using cheaper alternatives?

Edit: I meant moving off cloud to Hetzner, Vultr, DigitalOcean.

>>slaw+La
There's a lower bound on what these services can charge in the form of interconenction fees charged by the mobile service providers delivering the messages.

In the US, that's effectively zero due to the US phone infrastructure largely using a shared-cost model, but in most other countries which use "sender pays", these fees can be significant.