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Comment by Vinnl | Hacker News Reader

The main question is whether this will lead to a flywheel effect, where adoption is self-reinforcing. Because we've been seeing that in the Netherlands, a small country that is nevertheless now in the top 5 countries with most Signal users, where growth is now 25 times the usual rate. That is still a quite higher rate than:

> the week’s rate of adoption has been twice that of a typical week for 2025, which in turn was twice that of a typical week the same time last year.

Market penetration here is getting significant enough for more and more people.

[1] https://signalapp.nl/signal-app-nieuws/nederland-top-5-land-...

[2] https://signalapp.nl/signal-app-nieuws/nederlanders-kiezen-m...

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If Signal gets too popular then server costs will become significant. Signal needs a viable business model to survive. The big weakness here is that there is only one entity that can run the servers. If that server goes away then any attempt to start it up again would have to do so at the high level of usage that originally killed Signal.

Signal is, alas, merely a project. It will never morph into something like email that can withstand server running entities disappearing. So huge popularity could actually be a bad thing...

> If Signal gets too popular then server costs will become significant. Signal needs a viable business model to survive.

Signal is an incredibly lightweight design. If all users donated $0.60/year, or 5¢/month, that would sustain operations and overhead.

Compared to most other services, that's an insanely low cost per user.

EDIT: It's actually way less than even what I remembered - they only need about $0.60/user/year in order to break even, not $3/user/month.

Sure, but how would they go about capturing that money?

As usual, by having 1% of the users pay 100x the rate, because $60/y aka $5/mo is nothing to them. That is, identify well-moneyed users and offer them something substantially-looking but trivial to support. Twitter/X's blue marks are a perfect example.

Is this the one percent fallacy? Would 0.01% of users be willing to pay 10000x that amount?

> Would 0.01% of users be willing to pay 10000x that amount?

Apparently so, since Signal broke even last year.

But we were talking about a future situation where it became popular enough that the costs became much more considerable.

That $3/month figure actually makes me more concerned. Sure it's low for a business with revenue but donation funded services rarely get donations from more than a few percent of their users. So Signal probably needs something like $30-40/month from people who actually donate, which seems unlikely.

> That $3/month figure actually makes me more concerned. Sure it's low for a business with revenue but donation funded services rarely get donations from more than a few percent of their users

That's way, way lower than most other services, including most messaging services.

And donations aren't Signal's only source of revenue. Over a third comes from other sources.

> So Signal probably needs something like $30-40/month from people who actually donate, which seems unlikely.

Well, they broke even last year, so apparently it does work out.

$3/month is a lot of money, when their current revenue per user is approximately $0/month.

The minimum I can choose in-app is £5 ~$6.50/month (unless I do a one-time £3). I notice on their website they accept crypto, stock and "DAF" https://signal.org/donate/

> The minimum I can choose in-app is £5 ~$6.50/month (unless I do £3 one-off).

Price points are location-dependent, which is why it's a nice round figure for you in GBP even though Signal is not based in the UK.

Also, as you noted, they accept donations outside the app.

My point is that it's a rather high minimum (as is $5 if you select USD), not the roundness of the suggested amount.

Just to be explicit, since your comment doesn't mention it: via your link they also accept Credit Card, PayPal, and bank transfers, and you can specify custom amounts there.

If every user of free software donated for all the free software they use, people's monthly donation bill for their "free" software would be hundreds of dollars or more.

so what? that's not a reason to not donate at all. It's not an "all or nothing" proposition. donating a little is still better than donating nothing.

(and what's more, I disagree with your premise. I think I'd everyone donated, the cost would be very spread out and it would be shockingly affordable, especially relative to the benefits we get)

Before getting Zuckered, WhatsApp was run by a 10 person team or something.

Running chat apps doesn't have to be super expensive if you know what you're doing.

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