zlacker

>>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.

>>JumpCr+zn
I said Average for a reason :D I didn't say you can get "top-notch" security developers for that.

I don't think there's industry numbers for that set of people in the UK, as it's not a big enough set. However I'd be surprised if they were 150K plus though, that's a very rare salary in the UK.

Also there are cheaper countries than the UK who have great devs.

>>raesen+8E
There's definitely top-notch software and security engineers making well north of £150k in the UK. As you go up in levels, it's indeed a small set of people, but FB / Google comp for a top L7 engineer working in the same space as Signal engineers can be $700k+ in the UK. Just have a look at levels.fyi, and you'll see that even finance will pay over $500k in London. Furthermore, given how small the group of people are at the top of these companies, very few will self-report their incomes publicly, which is why you'll rarely hear about the engineers making $1M+ – but those cases do exist.

The people behind Signal pioneered end-to-end encryption, and as is pointed out in the blog post, there's still a lot of novel cryptography development involved in building a privacy-first messenger. You can't do that without top-notch talent.