You commented this twice, what's your backing, besides 'they're non-commercial thus must be fed by nefarious actors'?
replyI'm also worried about that these days. They posted an article a while back that Signal costs $50m per year to run, and that they make that money from "things". Together with how low a profile they keep, I'm not convinced they aren't a honeypot.
replyI love Signal and it's still my preferred messenger, but if it came out that they're backed by some government agency, I wouldn't be extremely surprised.
I and not necessarily many, but at least some people I know donate (and, somewhat irregularly, will continue to do so) small-ish amounts to the foundation. [1]
replyYou’d imagine that ought to be sufficient to cover running costs. However, it might actually not be enough with hardware prices these days? Not sure.
They’ve also recently (edit: “recently-ish”, it’s actually been a year!) introduced paid storage for backups, which I’d imagine comes with some amount of profit margin, too. [2]
I donate too, monthly (and subscribed to backups, even though I don't need them), but some more transparency in their finances would be good.
reply50 million a year is about 50 cents per user as they are said to have 100M active users. So it's not that bad really. Nothing that would require a 10$/month subscription.
reply> Together with how low a profile they keep, I'm not convinced they aren't a honeypot.
replyYou don't need to be convinced of such things. In fact, it's better if technical people remain skeptical and check.
I did in 2025. https://soatok.blog/2025/02/18/reviewing-the-cryptography-us...
This helps put my mind at ease, thanks.
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