zlacker

>>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
> far cheaper IT labor outside

This is a product that solves some of the harder problems of engineering, and has a staff of 50. Cheaper isn’t going to get you the best. If you had a staff of 1000, you could make that argument. Besides that’s not a lot of money to begin with. 340k is a senior engineer salary and I am sure the people running the company are far more capable than senior engineers.

> drop those features

That’s a valid argument, but 1.7M for that 20PB of bandwidth is not a lot of money. Dropping or making the features paid, defeats the purpose. If you’re trying to be the privacy first app that competes with WhatsApp and others, this would make it harder to be a viable alternative.

> sms registration fees

Education is a harder problem to solve, but offloading some of the costs to users may make sense here.