Operation of Signal will soon cost 50 million dollars per year
In an unusual move, the encrypted messaging service Signal has disclosed its costs. According to a blog post published on Thursday, the company will need approximately $50 million annually by 2025.
Salaries and other personnel expenses currently cost around 50 full-time employees 19 million dollars. The bandwidth required for data transmission alone costs 2.8 million dollars a year.
Signal consistently relies on end-to-end encryption, in which the content of the communication is only visible to the parties involved in plain text. Messages are therefore only stored temporarily on the company's servers for transmission. This also costs 1.3 million dollars a year.
Signal's encryption technology is used by chat service WhatsApp, among others. Signal is a non-profit organization and is run by a foundation. The service wants to finance itself in the long term with the help of a broad base of donors, wrote foundation chair Meredith Whittaker in the blog post. So far, Signal has been helped by a million-dollar donation from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton. He had received part of the more than 20 billion dollars that Facebook paid for WhatsApp and was subsequently one of the co-founders of the Signal Foundation. (SDA)
