Comment by sorenjan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sorenjan | Hacker News Reader

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I had this exact discussion in another thread here on HN less than 24 hours ago. Being supported by a non-profit is great, but how is that non-profit funded? They still need to pay their bills. Wikimedia get around $120 million in donations each year, can Signal get close to that?

According to Telegram's Pavel Durov, "A project of our size needs at least a few hundred million dollars per year to keep going." [0]. Telegram has close to 500 million monthly users, how will Signal pay for their operations when they approach the same numbers, which I assume is the goal? A business model will be needed, Telegram only recently started talking about how to bring in money from other sources than the personal savings of the founder.

Edit: Is it really relevant to compare to SSH? Does SSH have user signups or servers that handle large amounts of real time communication? How many developers does SSH have employed?

[0] https://t.me/durov/142

Telegram stores everything. You can send GBs videos and it will be stored and downloadable on any device from anywhere. It's like on a Dropbox or Drive. This costs a lot of money.

On the other hand, I think Signal doesn't store anything once it has been delivered and any backup will have to be made on separate via some DropBox or Drive.

So the cost should be far far less than Telegram

So Telegram stores files at a cost of a few hundred million dollars each year? It sounds a bit unbelievable that a big majority of their operating cost is simply storage, but I really don't know. Anyway, sounds like a great feature that others should have as well.

Signal does store stuff if you have desktop clients logged in. It doesn't rely on the mobile client to forward it like Whatsapp Web. But it only stores it until they have all retrieved it, or they have timed out. I don't know how long Telegram keeps stuff.

Desktop client or phone client or tablet client, Signal will store the messages on its servers for several days or until they’re delivered, whichever is earlier.

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