> 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.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/18/business/twitter-blue-two-fac...
Previous Twitter employees have said that this is incorrect. Because Twitter began as an SMS-only (and then SMS-first) application (remember 40404?), they very early on established direct-connection infrastructure for sending SMS, meaning that they have a marginal cost of literally $0.00/message in most markets. Twitter still has to maintain that infrastructure, because they didn't get rid of SMS 2FA - they just restricted it to Twitter Blue users, so the overhead is still the same.
Almost nobody else who delivers SMS today has that infrastructure, because it doesn't make sense for most services to build.
The only place where Twitter was paying significant amounts for SMS was due to SMS pump schemes, which is a consequence of Twitter gutting its anti-spam detection, resulting in them paying for SMS pumping which was previously blocked.
I am very, very interested to understand how that works, because without more detail or sources I'm calling bullshit. I definitely understand how Twitter could have greatly reduced their per-message fee with telecom providers, but at the end of the day Twitter is not a telecom and is still at the mercy of whoever is that "last mile" for actually delivering the SMS to your phone, so I don't understand how they have no marginal cost here. Happy to be proven wrong.
So sending 1 costs the same as sending a 10 million. It isn't that they are free to send, its that they are charged for access to the system, but aren't charged per message.