Comment by mortallywounded
2 years ago
I don't understand how storage can cost a million dollars when they don't store anything. Even if messages are queued, how do you get millions of dollars in queued storage? It's hard for me to imagine... even if you receive and send trillions of messages I don't think you would end up storing much at all.
As for registration fees, it sounds like they should use authenticator instead of SMS... and stop requiring a phone number to sign up. That is why I left Signal (went with Matrix). I don't see why anyone would want to tie their Signal to a phone. If you value privacy, why would you do that?
Servers cost seems excessive as well. I don't believe you need that many servers, even if you served a boat load of requests.
As for bandwidth.. okay, that may be the case. I am not sure how you can get that cost down.
> Even if messages are queued, how do you get millions of dollars in queued storage? It's hard for me to imagine...
The details are there in this post, but I can offer a few guesses. Users may be using multiple devices. And the service has to deliver to all the linked devices before ejecting the message from its storage. The time limit for storing and waiting for linked devices to come online is about a month. With tens of millions of users, this could add up.
Even if every user had dozens of queued up messages, I don't think it equals millions in storage costs. Maybe I'm naive, but I have a storage/database/queue with billions of records and it costs <$700/month.
shrugs
I think some messages will cost more storage than others. I have 4 devices synced to my Signal account. Yesterday, my friend sent me a 6.8 MB cat video[1]. I presume Signal has to store this cat video until I boot up my 4th device and load the queued messages.
[1]: It was a copy of this cat video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8Ud1Cr76j8s