* $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.
- I'd drop these features if possible, or give them to donors.
- 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.
- 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
They can't really do that, it deters adoption of something with a network effect.
The real issue here is that direct connections have privacy implications (maybe you don't want the other party to know your IP address), so they relay everything. If they could solve that they could save a lot of money.
For example, detect if the user is connected via a known VPN service (which is likely given Signal's user base) and then let the VPN hide the user's IP address instead of Signal having to pay for it. Or make a deal with popular VPNs to put the relay servers in their data centers, which gives a similar advantage and they might be able to get better pricing from them in general because the VPNs already have a lot of bandwidth, are sympathetic to what Signal does and could use it as PR.