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
is there any way they can reduce that cost?

>>bilal4+S1
Yeah, decouple Signal user identity from the phone number.

>>java-m+s2
This will probably never happen. One of the reasons WhatsApp blew up is because using a phone number as your source of identification means there's much less friction in the signup flow. No username/password to create and your social graph is already there in your contact list.

My mom was able to get our entire extended family on Signal without my involvement, which is a testament to how easy that is.

>>tapoxi+66
Nobody is demanding them to stop supporting phone numbers as identifiers/verification methods.

I'm not mad at all if somebody prefers using their phone number and not having a password for a service – just give me the option to use my email address and/or a username.

There are too many "phone number only" services out there these days.