If you pay Signal $1/year, they'll realistically see about 60-70 cents of that – and that's only considering payment processor fees.
Now add the cost of providing support (it's a paid product now!), payment handling on their end (in a privacy-preserving way, which excludes most common payment methods), and top it off with the immense damage to the network effect by excluding all the users that can't or simply don't want to pay $1/year...
You can also charge for a 10 year minimum and get to a higher retained %
You don't need to provide support, even much more expensive consumer services live without a proper one, so being explicit about the fact that you only pay for infrastructure could suffice
Not sure why payment privacy has to be so strict for everyone
The network effect damage is real, but maybe it could be limited with donations :)
Selling a service automatically opts you in to all kinds of consumer protections, either legally or de facto through the dispute mechanism of the payment methods your customers use.
Just ignoring customer complaints and selling the service "as-is" is usually not an option.
Thanks for over-analyzing my comment. $1/year, $2/year, $5/year, is all insignificant in the wide array of things I pay for. Sure, I'd pay $10/year for Signal as it is today if they really needed me to. And I never said to make payment mandatory. You're just way over analyzing a simple comment.
I'd pay substantially more for Signal if I could bot accounts.
I'd like a signal daemon on all my servers for alerting which could message me via Signal. This is worth a monthly fee to me.
I know people running small businesses who would really like to have a business Signal account: an ability to send Signal messages as a business identity without tying it to some specific phone number. This would be worth a subscription even if they had to get their customers to install Signal.
Signal need to figure out what product they sell that's going to fund the privacy objective: because there's plenty and they're worth having.
I know I could do these things, but the problem is (1) it's a cat and mouse game of trying to keep up with functionality they don't want to support and (2) means I'm not paying them for a service, which is the point of doing it.
IMO Signal need to figure out what they sell to people with the money to say "yes, this service helps me make money" so they fulfill the big mission statement. That's true viability.
Within that bucket there's some real obvious ones: server monitoring and alerting (I have Signal, let my severs have Signal so they can talk to me, maybe at an agreed reduced throughput rate so someone doesn't just try to run TCP/IP over it), and letting businesses have a secure multimedia messaging channel to their clients for notifications.
I'd pay much more than $2 if they offered account identifiers other than phone numbers. Trying to get a burner SIM or DID while still staying anonymous is getting increasingly difficult.
But I think it's pretty clear by now that this is a feature for FVEY IC, not a bug. FFS, they burned development resources on stickers, but abjectly refuse to offer alternative account identifiers. The standard apologist response is, "but phone numbers make adoption easier". Sure, but nobody is asking to replace the identifiers, or even to make them nondefault. We're just asking for the option. It could be hidden behind a developer mode for all I care, but it should be there.
The fact that they abjectly refuse to do it is enough to tell you about what their true motivations likely are.
Agreed, at this point I don't believe the "privacy" aspect of Signal's sales sheet means anything. Most that I know use it primarily because they can have clients on all platforms, including desktop.
Indeed, the Wire messenger is done like this - it offers phone number, but has an option to not use them and only rely on the usernames (although I think you need to register in the web browser for that)
If you pay Signal $1/year, they'll realistically see about 60-70 cents of that – and that's only considering payment processor fees.
Now add the cost of providing support (it's a paid product now!), payment handling on their end (in a privacy-preserving way, which excludes most common payment methods), and top it off with the immense damage to the network effect by excluding all the users that can't or simply don't want to pay $1/year...
Donations seem like the much better option here.
You can also charge for a 10 year minimum and get to a higher retained %
You don't need to provide support, even much more expensive consumer services live without a proper one, so being explicit about the fact that you only pay for infrastructure could suffice
Not sure why payment privacy has to be so strict for everyone
The network effect damage is real, but maybe it could be limited with donations :)
Selling a service automatically opts you in to all kinds of consumer protections, either legally or de facto through the dispute mechanism of the payment methods your customers use.
Just ignoring customer complaints and selling the service "as-is" is usually not an option.
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Thanks for over-analyzing my comment. $1/year, $2/year, $5/year, is all insignificant in the wide array of things I pay for. Sure, I'd pay $10/year for Signal as it is today if they really needed me to. And I never said to make payment mandatory. You're just way over analyzing a simple comment.
I'd pay substantially more for Signal if I could bot accounts.
I'd like a signal daemon on all my servers for alerting which could message me via Signal. This is worth a monthly fee to me.
I know people running small businesses who would really like to have a business Signal account: an ability to send Signal messages as a business identity without tying it to some specific phone number. This would be worth a subscription even if they had to get their customers to install Signal.
Signal need to figure out what product they sell that's going to fund the privacy objective: because there's plenty and they're worth having.
If you want one for just personal use; this works well: https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli
Just sign up with a Twilio number (using voice call) and you can make your own bot.
I know I could do these things, but the problem is (1) it's a cat and mouse game of trying to keep up with functionality they don't want to support and (2) means I'm not paying them for a service, which is the point of doing it.
IMO Signal need to figure out what they sell to people with the money to say "yes, this service helps me make money" so they fulfill the big mission statement. That's true viability.
Within that bucket there's some real obvious ones: server monitoring and alerting (I have Signal, let my severs have Signal so they can talk to me, maybe at an agreed reduced throughput rate so someone doesn't just try to run TCP/IP over it), and letting businesses have a secure multimedia messaging channel to their clients for notifications.
1 reply →
I'd pay much more than $2 if they offered account identifiers other than phone numbers. Trying to get a burner SIM or DID while still staying anonymous is getting increasingly difficult.
But I think it's pretty clear by now that this is a feature for FVEY IC, not a bug. FFS, they burned development resources on stickers, but abjectly refuse to offer alternative account identifiers. The standard apologist response is, "but phone numbers make adoption easier". Sure, but nobody is asking to replace the identifiers, or even to make them nondefault. We're just asking for the option. It could be hidden behind a developer mode for all I care, but it should be there.
The fact that they abjectly refuse to do it is enough to tell you about what their true motivations likely are.
Agreed, at this point I don't believe the "privacy" aspect of Signal's sales sheet means anything. Most that I know use it primarily because they can have clients on all platforms, including desktop.
> We're just asking for the option
Indeed, the Wire messenger is done like this - it offers phone number, but has an option to not use them and only rely on the usernames (although I think you need to register in the web browser for that)