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Signal costs $50m / year to run!

https://www.wired.com/story/signal-operating-costs/

there are 2 things that puzzles me on this

1. currently their spending amount totals to $33mm, with $14 million on infrastructure and $19 million on staff cost - per year. But they only have 50 full time staffs. That either means each employees take home salary is $30k per month, which is really high, or there is a huge allocation going else.

2. This idea of "non-profit" - doesn't mean, its non-revenue generating business. You can generate very high revenue - but you have to expense out all your earnings/profits back into the business - hence zero-profit. Allbirds, Patagonia are B-Corps who are 100% public benefit company. I am not too sure what's the restriction Signal has in generating revenue.

I also think the focus hasn't been much on business strategy, business growth nor user adoption as it has been putting in engineering and R&D effort into creating stories, altcoin.

I think more business expansion focus is needed - ie like being able to transfer bitcoin/fiat through it would expand purpose and hence more users.

I might be wrong here, but I have always found Signal's budget allocation a little odd but i might be completely wrong. cc nostr:npub1wmr34t36fy03m8hvgl96zl3znndyzyaqhwmwdtshwmtkg03fetaqhjg240 as I saw this post through his repost, and nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m who is a major funder and would have better clarity

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Discussion

rabble 2y ago

A couple things. If you’re pulling away engineers, product people, etc from FANG companies who’ve been at the scale signal needs to grow then 30k a month for fully encumbered cost it’s that unbelievable. Remember a lot of the cost of an employee doesn’t end up in that employees bank account. Remember you qualify for public housing in San Francisco if you make less than $150k a year, essentially that’s the real poverty / living wage line.

Also American non-profits are MUCH more restricted than benefit corps. Essentially they aren’t legally allowed to do the things which a normal business would do to be profitable.

Running large tech platforms is very expensive. Scaling is expensive. And Moxie told me one of the hardest parts of building and growing signal was the way non-profit rules limited their options, essentially crippling them.