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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

I'm also worried about that these days. They posted an article a while back that Signal costs $50m per year to run, and that they make that money from "things". Together with how low a profile they keep, I'm not convinced they aren't a honeypot.

I love Signal and it's still my preferred messenger, but if it came out that they're backed by some government agency, I wouldn't be extremely surprised.

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> Together with how low a profile they keep, I'm not convinced they aren't a honeypot.

You don't need to be convinced of such things. In fact, it's better if technical people remain skeptical and check.

I did in 2025. https://soatok.blog/2025/02/18/reviewing-the-cryptography-us...

This helps put my mind at ease, thanks.

I and not necessarily many, but at least some people I know donate (and, somewhat irregularly, will continue to do so) small-ish amounts to the foundation. [1]

You’d imagine that ought to be sufficient to cover running costs. However, it might actually not be enough with hardware prices these days? Not sure.

They’ve also recently (edit: “recently-ish”, it’s actually been a year!) introduced paid storage for backups, which I’d imagine comes with some amount of profit margin, too. [2]

[1] https://signal.org/donate/

[2] https://signal.org/blog/introducing-secure-backups/

I donate too, monthly (and subscribed to backups, even though I don't need them), but some more transparency in their finances would be good.

50 million a year is about 50 cents per user as they are said to have 100M active users. So it's not that bad really. Nothing that would require a 10$/month subscription.

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