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
I really wonder why it’s so expensive to run. I always hear things about scaling but I used to run a top 500 alexia website and it was just a php app running on a mutualized offer for $5/month. Lots of manual caching though but still.

My wild guess is that either the stack is not really optimal (last I heard it was java) or they do other costly things at scale (sgx?)

>>baby+G5
You can't send an sms yourself like you can an email. Instead of setting up a server, you have to work with a telco provider (an aggregator specifically). Any SMS service eventually hands off to one of these. Many SaaS SMS providers are just frontends for legacy telco services. They charge insane fees because they can, that is all there is to it.

Sending mass email is still difficult. Its probably easier to pay a provider than set up and establish reputation for yourself. But they don't charge near the rates. Last time I compared rates it was something like 10x-100x to send an sms compared to an email, but it has been a while.

>>dexwiz+ki
Maybe they should flip it on its head - get a thousand? Ten thousand? numbers that can accept SMS and tell people to "text 473843 to this number" to verify.

>>bombca+Sk
SMS sender isn't generally something you can trust. If you get the SMS directly from the carrier that's responsible for the number, and you have reason to trust their SMS sending to verify the sender, then yes. But in countries with number portability, you still need to pay to lookup the carrier responsible for a number.

And you'll need to maintain ingress numbers in all the countries you support, and maybe numbers per carrier, depending, and you'll need to tell the user the right number to text to ... it's a lot, and it might not work well or might not save much money.