Signal is the world’s most widely used truly private messaging app, and our cryptographic technologies provide extra layers of privacy beyond the Signal app itself. Since launching in 2013, the Signal Protocol—our end-to-end encryption technology—has become the de facto standard for private commu...
Is it just me or is $19 million per year for 50 full-time employees insane?
Even for US salary standards.
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.
Also from the source:
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.
My guess: People who can be as competent with security as they need are very expensive.
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:
At least the private contact discovery is not very private:
Phone numbers are so not-sparse that there even was a game to text your “number neighbor”. I can probably build a pretty effective rainbow table for this with my current hardware.
Role of thumb is an employee costs roughly twice their base salary, as the employee still needs to cover insurance, taxes, sick time, and other benefits.
That leaves an average salary of 190K for the 50 employees. That isn’t much for tech.