We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.
We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.
Is it just me or is $19 million per year for 50 full-time employees insane?
Even for US salary standards.
Not necessarily.
Signal has people who are experts in their field. They engineer solutions that don’t exist anywhere else in the market to ensure they have as little information on you as possible while keeping you secure [0]. This in turn means high compensation + benefits. You don’t want to be paying your key developers peanuts as that makes them liable to taking bribes from adversaries to “oops” a security vulnerability in the service. In addition, the higher compensation is a great way to mitigate losing talent to private organizations who can afford it.
[0] Signal has engineered the following technologies that all work to ensure your privacy and security:
My guess: People who can be as competent with security as they need are very expensive.
Not at all. That’s $380K per person if everyone is making the same. Engineers with a few years of experience at Meta make $400K+.
Don’t forget the employer taxes, insurance, recruitment costs and so on. It wouldn’t surprise me if the employees are earning on average half that.
Exactly.
For the current distribution I quote from the linked source :
Current Infrastructure Costs (as of November 2023): Approximately $14 million dollars per year.
Yes, but I was talking about the salary part, which is separate from the costs you mentioned.
It’s 19 million just for people.
Yhea no worries, I was just trying to get all the budgets together. I agree it seems quite an high budget
Also from the source: