In this Podcast episode (down below) someone who says to be working together with signal for the German community says that it’s an open secret that signal plans to introduce premium feature to diversify their revenue model for long term sustainability. He makes one example avout automatic Cloud Backups for the chats, but doesn’t give more details.
It’s in German, but I post it anyways because I know that here are a lot of German speaking people.
Here the mp3 file to the episode 6. He says is about half in the episode.
True it’s controversial but signal always has been a messenger for the masses.
Having Extra-fearures which you don’t really need is fine for me.
Telegram I think also had this business model where people played for emojies or extra stuff which 90% of users never would use.
What makes you feel that way, and what do you think a better revenue model would be?)
Personally a freemium model with a free core app that doesn’t compromise on privacy or security with some paid non-essential features seems like a reasonable balance. I’m sure there are probably other reasonable funding models as well, I’m not wedded to this one, I just want Signal to be sustainable.
(if not aware, Signal–a non profit-- is not currently sustainable, they operate at a loss and have been largely dependent on a set of large donations from a single individual, but that runway is limited). They wrote a blogpost outlining some of the financial realities they face that is worth a read Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive
if they removed the phone number dependency , they would save 42% of their costs ! , but I understand why they did , they want to replace Whatsapp/iMessage …
If they want to replace WhatsApp and iMessage then not requiring a phone number would be a huge advantage. Actually iMessage already doesn’t technically require a phone number, just an email. If they didn’t require a phone number or an email they would be ahead of the curve.
You’re right that would be a big potential savings, but it isn’t anywhere close to 42% I think you may have mistook their infrastructure costs (14M) for total operating costs (50M)[1].
As a % of their total annual operating costs (~50M) it represents a savings of roughly a bit over 10%, if verification costs could be eliminated entirely without incurring costs elsewhere for anti-abuse/anti-spam.
But I think the fundamental premise remains the same regardless of the specific numbers: Signal has a real and unavoidable operating cost, and must at some point find some sustainable revenue model that reliably covers the operating costs and allows a little extra for development + improvement. I think there are many potential paths they could take.
“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”↩︎
Premium features are for closed software. For open projects there are donations. And once you add one premium (non free) feature, greed initiates itself…
you’re right and i wish they were like session/simplex and not requiring any identifiable information but i meant they want to replace them in the sense that it’s much easier to just find people already in your phone’s contact list rather than contact them elsewhere to find their username , and i guess it’s the reason why Signal has 100M+ installs on android and that’s 100x more than Session or any other messaging app that doesn’t require phone numbers
you’re right , my bad , i miscalculated the percentage , well If they didn’t require a phone number , they would save on the private contact discovery cost as well .
But even with those costs cut Signal will still be bleeding millions per year and i don’t think donations will ever be able to cover those costs , i wouldn’t mind a freemium model like Proton , what other features can they add behind a paywall that would be worth paying for but still free users wouldn’t feel they’re missing on ?
larger video/audio groups ?
larger file size sending limit (like telegram)
larger public channels ? (one of strong points of Telegram, but i think it would be very challenging with E2ee as it would be impossible (?) to get messages prior to hoining the channel ?
support multiple accounts ?
use more/multiple devices insead of one android/ios limit
I don’t know why it’s brought up to compare with Signal, which had 40M active users per month back in 2022. Not every project can survive with just donations alone, especially with projects with intensive server usages. At this stage, they have to think any (moral) possible other ways to survive.