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. 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.

You get what you pay for, though. $338k/year seems like a reasonable salary for people working on something as privacy critical as Signal – just because you're working for a nonprofit doesn't mean you have to work for less competitive wages.

>>vore+Tc
Whilst competitive salaries are important, it's fair to say that, outside of the US, you can get good people for a lot less than $338k/year.

To give one example of a (not that cheap) market, outside of London average developer salaries are probably under $50k in the UK. Even accounting for additional costs like taxation and equipment, that's likely to be under $100k fully loaded.

>>raesen+2i
> outside of London average developer salaries are probably under $50k in the UK

For top-notch security developers, I call bullshit. Signal would be worthless if it started offshoring development to nickel and dime.

zlacker