this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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I see a lot of people saying it's time to switch to Signal, and I mean I agree in principle, it's my main messaging app, but I don't see how it can scale. It runs off of donations and the only reason it's still functioning is because the users that are there are above averagely passionate about it and willing to donate. If it became the defacto messaging app I fear that there is no way they would be capable of financing that level of traffic.
I'd probably still use it if I had to pay for it
I mean, there are some who will be willing to do that, but the vast majority of average people won't pay for something if a free version exists (like WhatsApp)
Edit: Ok I just Googled it and apparently their operational costs are less than 1$ per user per year which is far less than I expected. That's way more sustainable in that case, possibly even through just donations.
Even if they charged 1.99 they'd be making a decent cut for future investment (they are a nonprofit).
GrapheneOS lives on donations too. Its definately possible.
I mean comparing it to GrapheneOS doesn't make much sense, they don't have recurring costs.
What, like salaries?
https://grapheneos.org/hiring
No, they don't have recurring costs that scale with their size. The whole original point of my argument was that Signal is fine now because its userbase is above averagely passionate about it and willing to donate, but if it were to become mainstream that would mean the percent of its users donating would go down whilst its cost would go up, in other words its costs would outscale its revenue. This doesn't apply to GaprheneOS as their costs don't scale with the number of users.
I think you're missing the point. All I was saying is that both Signal and Graphene are both nonprofits and both seem to be doing okay with their donations business model.
And donations aren't just a euro here and there from users. Proton is rumoured to be one of Graphene's supporters.
Yes but my entire point is that it just isn't comparable because of the insane scales we're talking about. For example, WhatsApp has 2 billion monthly active users. Let's say Signal had the same number and let's say it costs them 0.5$ per user per year (probably an underestimate). That's 1 billion dollars in yearly expenses. Wikipedia, which is one of the most successful donation based companies to my knowledge, has a yearly income of only 180 million $. I just don't see there being enough donation capacity in the general population to sustain that high of a figure.
GrapheneOS might be fine even with 2 bilion users with the same amount of funding as they have now, because their costs aren't tied to their userbase. But scaling Signal to the size we're talking about is an entirely different beast.