Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

>>mikece+(OP)
Some of these things raise an eyebrow and I'd like them further broken down (but in the mean time, I'm still donating):

* $19 million for 50 staff

  - That's $338k/head on average. At face value for a nonprofit, I'd like these costs broke down as this seems excessive. There is far cheaper IT labor available outside SV.

* 20 petabytes per year of bandwidth, or 20 million gigabytes, to enable voice and video calling alone, which comes to $1.7 million a year

  - I'd drop these features if possible, or give them to donors.

* Storage: $1.3m, Servers: $2.9m

  - I was actually expecting this to be far higher

  - Long term storage should probably be donor-only

  - Servers could likely be optimized by going hybrid cloud with colocation and owning own hardware, but again, was surprised how "little" they're spending on this.

* Sms registration fees: $6m

  - Stop contributing and supporting the "Your phone number is your identity" problem.

  - Move towards helping educating society and establishing a set of encryption keys as their long term identity

It's easy to criticize from the bleachers. Still thankful for the app and I'll continue to donate.

>>exabri+E9
> That's $338k/head on average.

Oh come on. Just because the organization is non-profit, meaning that it's not out to make a profit for shareholders, is no justification for the staff to be paid below their market worth. In fact, they could definitely earn more by quitting and working at for profit companies. And that is especially true for those who are getting the higher end of the compensation.

And say that staff number was like, $5m/year less? It doesn't change the fact that costs of running are substantial and more donation is needed from those who want it to remain viable.

zlacker