In a first, the Signal Foundation publishes Signal's operating costs: ~$40M in 2023, projected to hit $50M by 2025, with $14M for infrastructure costs in 2023
WiredAndy Greenberg
Context & Ripple Effects
Signal Foundation was created with a $50M commitment from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, making its ability to sustain a privacy-focused service a central question alongside product growth. The newly disclosed cost base makes that funding challenge more concrete.
The projection also aligns with later reporting that Signal's annual run rate was about $50M as it considered encrypted backups, a feature direction that can add to the operational burden of an encrypted service.
First-order effects
The disclosure gives donors, users, and the Foundation a clearer baseline for the cost of operating Signal: infrastructure alone accounted for a material share of 2023 spending.
A projected rise in annual costs increases the Foundation's near-term need to plan fundraising and spending against a larger recurring operating budget.
Second-order effects
Because Signal partly relies on AWS, its growing infrastructure bill makes cloud efficiency and vendor dependence more consequential, even though the disclosed figure does not assign all infrastructure spending to AWS.
Feature decisions face a sharper budget trade-off: additions that expand storage or service capacity must be funded without compromising Signal's end-to-end-encryption model.
Third-order effects
If encrypted messaging services continue to grow while remaining nonprofit-funded, operating-cost transparency could become a stronger differentiator in how they establish funding credibility and governance accountability.
The disclosure points to a broader structural tension: privacy-preserving communications may carry recurring infrastructure costs that are difficult to offset without subscriptions, donations, or other durable funding mechanisms.
The trend: Encrypted communication platforms are increasingly confronting the economics of funding privacy-first infrastructure at scale.
It's admirable the lengths Signal goes to preserve user privacy, even when it increases their costs significantly. Just the cost of running SMS/voice registration services is around $6M a year and they seemingly have little leverage in negotiating these rates. https://signal.org…
Just read @signalapp 's writeup on their operating costs - really nice to see transparency on this. Reminded me that I'd not got round to setting up a regular donation to them so I did that and have to say, that's easily the slickest donation flow I've ever seen. Nice work! — …
~1/10 of the entire cost of the nonprofit private messenger Signal ($6m a year of ~$50m a year by 2025) are given straight to telecoms companies for SMS registration services. These telcos hike the prices of SMS as they know firms using them for registration will have to pay.
For the first time, Signal has released a breakdown of its costs, which will reach $50 million a year by 2025. Its president @mer__edith says this isn't just an appeal for donations. It's a way to highlight the surveillance profit model they're up against. https://www.wired.com/.…
So proud of @signalapp for saying the quiet part loud. Evading the reality of these infrastructural dependencies prevents progress towards bold policy change. This blog is required reading for anyone thinking about alternatives to the surveillance biz model.
A pleasure to talk through the political economy of tech with @a_greenberg, and discuss how Signal competes with tech monopolies without replicating their harmful business models ❤️
Really proud of Signal, of this piece, and so happy to be at an organization willing to be honest about what others hide: the incredible cost of developing consumer tech, and why it's so hard (but rewarding!) to build tech that doesn't rely on monetizing surveillance. 👇👇👇
If nothing else, an interesting break down of the cost of running a robust messaging system. 😊 Interesting cost for the verification system alone, curious why. https://signal.org/...
Signal is a nonprofit. But what does this mean in practice? Today we do something most tech co's avoid: talk money. What does it cost for Signal to play in a lane dominated by billion $ corporations, while rejecting the surveillance business model? 1/ https://signal.org/... [imag…
We're doing this to provide transparency into Signal, and to make clear why our choice of nonprofit status isn't just nice to have, but a fundamental safeguard against the pressures of a profitable business model that fundamentally contradicts our stance on privacy. 2/