zlacker

I'd be happy to pay $1/year for signal, and I'd pay $2/year if it were decoupled from my phone number.

>>lepton+(OP)
If you pay Signal $1/year, they'll realistically see about 60-70 cents of that – and that's only considering payment processor fees.

Now add the cost of providing support (it's a paid product now!), payment handling on their end (in a privacy-preserving way, which excludes most common payment methods), and top it off with the immense damage to the network effect by excluding all the users that can't or simply don't want to pay $1/year...

Donations seem like the much better option here.

>>lxgr+O6
You can also charge for a 10 year minimum and get to a higher retained %

You don't need to provide support, even much more expensive consumer services live without a proper one, so being explicit about the fact that you only pay for infrastructure could suffice

Not sure why payment privacy has to be so strict for everyone

The network effect damage is real, but maybe it could be limited with donations :)

>>eviks+Eb
Selling a service automatically opts you in to all kinds of consumer protections, either legally or de facto through the dispute mechanism of the payment methods your customers use.

Just ignoring customer complaints and selling the service "as-is" is usually not an option.

>>lxgr+Cc
Why is it not an option when it already exists in many places (all these protections fail all the time)? Your first sentence doesn't imply high/expensive level of customer service

Besides, even now they're not ignoring all the complaints, the do fix bugs?

Maybe to be more specific, how much did it cost WhatsApp when they had $1 price and a tiny team? How does it compare to the cost of SMS?

>>lepton+(OP)
I'd pay much more than $2 if they offered account identifiers other than phone numbers. Trying to get a burner SIM or DID while still staying anonymous is getting increasingly difficult.

But I think it's pretty clear by now that this is a feature for FVEY IC, not a bug. FFS, they burned development resources on stickers, but abjectly refuse to offer alternative account identifiers. The standard apologist response is, "but phone numbers make adoption easier". Sure, but nobody is asking to replace the identifiers, or even to make them nondefault. We're just asking for the option. It could be hidden behind a developer mode for all I care, but it should be there.

The fact that they abjectly refuse to do it is enough to tell you about what their true motivations likely are.

>>lxgr+O6
Thanks for over-analyzing my comment. $1/year, $2/year, $5/year, is all insignificant in the wide array of things I pay for. Sure, I'd pay $10/year for Signal as it is today if they really needed me to. And I never said to make payment mandatory. You're just way over analyzing a simple comment.

>>caeril+Xs
Agreed, at this point I don't believe the "privacy" aspect of Signal's sales sheet means anything. Most that I know use it primarily because they can have clients on all platforms, including desktop.

>>lepton+(OP)
I'd pay substantially more for Signal if I could bot accounts.

I'd like a signal daemon on all my servers for alerting which could message me via Signal. This is worth a monthly fee to me.

I know people running small businesses who would really like to have a business Signal account: an ability to send Signal messages as a business identity without tying it to some specific phone number. This would be worth a subscription even if they had to get their customers to install Signal.

Signal need to figure out what product they sell that's going to fund the privacy objective: because there's plenty and they're worth having.

>>XorNot+RJ
If you want one for just personal use; this works well: https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli

Just sign up with a Twilio number (using voice call) and you can make your own bot.

>>eviks+bl
In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users used the service each month. The year 2013 ended with $148 million in expenses, of which $138 million in losses.[1]

FB acquired them next year and if my memory is correct there were 19 in the team then.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp

>>jenny9+4M
I know I could do these things, but the problem is (1) it's a cat and mouse game of trying to keep up with functionality they don't want to support and (2) means I'm not paying them for a service, which is the point of doing it.

IMO Signal need to figure out what they sell to people with the money to say "yes, this service helps me make money" so they fulfill the big mission statement. That's true viability.

Within that bucket there's some real obvious ones: server monitoring and alerting (I have Signal, let my severs have Signal so they can talk to me, maybe at an agreed reduced throughput rate so someone doesn't just try to run TCP/IP over it), and letting businesses have a secure multimedia messaging channel to their clients for notifications.

>>YetAno+Vl1
That $ figure tells us nothing as it includes those same huge SMS costs that Signal is on an unsustainable path to rack up

With just a bit more effort you can see that most of those $148 are not related to the extra customer support we're discussing, but rather to the things that Signal is already doing

Costs and expenses in 2013:

Cost of revenue 53 (payment processing fees, infrastructure costs, SMS verification fees and employee compensation for part of operations team)

R&D 77 (engineering and technical teams who are responsible for the design, development, and testing of the features)

G&A 19

>>caeril+Xs
> We're just asking for the option

Indeed, the Wire messenger is done like this - it offers phone number, but has an option to not use them and only rely on the usernames (although I think you need to register in the web browser for that)

>>eviks+x02
So for $10M revenue, they had $53M cost of revenue. I think asking for $1 is never going to be sustainable, even if leave all other costs. My guess is that "employee compensation for part of operations team" is the primary one taking all the cost, as payment processing fees couldn't be more than the revenue itself and one message is pretty cheap.

>>YetAno+Ud2
Why not? Someone calculated above that total costs are below $1 for Signal even with all the SMS waste (also, it doesn't have to be a literal $1)

Besides, the original point was about huge$ from running a paid vs free app, which isn't the case

>>XorNot+9u1
I find signald better. It also supports acting like a desktop client... so you can just add it to your account easily. signal-cli might do that also, but I stopped using it in favor of signald when I found that one.

But yeah, I hear you. It would be nice if it had a official bot interface where maybe all the bot's receipients have to be whitelisted so that it's easy to use for stuff like server monitoring but not easy to use for spamming.