Signal Reveals Its Operation Costs, Estimates $50 Million a Year In 2024

gaiageek writes: Of note, given the recent Slashdot article about Signal opening up to trying out usernames, is the $6 million annual cost of sending SMS messages for account verification, which certainly suggests that getting rid of phone number verification would be a significant cost-saving solution. Signal pays $14 million a year in infrastructure costs, for instance, including the price of servers, bandwidth, and storage. It uses about 20 petabytes per year of bandwidth, or 20 million gigabytes, to enable voice and video calling alone, which comes to $1.7 million a year. The biggest chunk of those infrastructure costs, fully $6 million annually, goes to telecom firms to pay for the SMS text messages Signal uses to send registration codes to verify new Signal accounts' phone numbers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.