Signal’s president reveals the cost of running the privacy-preserving platform—not just to drum up donations, but to call out the for-profit surveillance business models it competes against.
Signal’s operating costs: around $40 million this year
$14 million a year in infrastructure costs
$6 million annually, goes to telecom firms to pay for the SMS text messages Signal uses to send registration codes to verify new Signal accounts’ phone numbers
$19 million a year or so out of Signal’s budget pays for its staff. Signal now employs about 50 people
Staff budget seem crazy high with about 50 people. That’s an average of $31.666 per month per employee.
Adding up the 7 listed employees there is about $3.5 million, leaving $15.5 million for the remaining 47 employees, giving an average of $360,000 a year per employee. Damn good wage.
It’s all explained in the document, basically the telecom companies realized that people do not send SMS anymore and that the value of them lies now on the companies that need to send you verification texts and other automated messages, as a consequence, they inflated the cost of those to extract as much money as they can. The document also describes fraudsters that register numbers en masse to drive SMS traffic on a particular network and then make money of the fees.
I had a staff of 16 mid-level technicians and payroll was about 4 million. Benefits and other crap that didn’t end up on the paycheck are included in payroll.
Staff budget seem crazy high with about 50 people. That’s an average of $31.666 per month per employee.
In all likelihood a lot of that goes to the top 5 of those 50. If I’m wrong… good.
You can see compensation here https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840
Adding up the 7 listed employees there is about $3.5 million, leaving $15.5 million for the remaining 47 employees, giving an average of $360,000 a year per employee. Damn good wage.
Hmm, COO/CTO making $450k-650k a year is high for a non profit but, not obnoxiously high
Their president makes less than $200k
These guys are way smarter than me and have clearly thought about this, but 15% of your operating costs seems wildly high for verifying phone numbers.
It’s all explained in the document, basically the telecom companies realized that people do not send SMS anymore and that the value of them lies now on the companies that need to send you verification texts and other automated messages, as a consequence, they inflated the cost of those to extract as much money as they can. The document also describes fraudsters that register numbers en masse to drive SMS traffic on a particular network and then make money of the fees.
I had a staff of 16 mid-level technicians and payroll was about 4 million. Benefits and other crap that didn’t end up on the paycheck are included in payroll.
Still might be high, but if that’s budget #s, the employee pay is much lower after taking into about related overhead.
Like HanDman said, hopefully it’s not all going to the top handful.
6 million annually? could they not find some other means to verify or remove the requirement altogether - insanity