Signal users can give a recurring monthly contribution (opens in new tab)

Not to mention that they keep investing in things that people don't necessarily care about (like the crypto currency embedded in the app).

It is kind of beyond me why people would submit to monthly donations to a company which only care about its own interests.

What do you mean 'not fully released'? It's here: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

These are not requirements for most messaging app users. I just want secure messaging. I don’t care if it’s open or interoperable. WhatsApp if it was run by a non profit.

My grandparents can all set it up without me flying over to do it for them.

Concessions have to be made somewhere.

> Whatever you say about privacy Signal is not an ally of user freedom.

Good reminder for those that don't know, but did anyone ever claim otherwise? From the very start, releasing the source code was meant exclusively as a way to ensure trust == security. It was never about software freedom - the only freedom the devs mentioned was freedom of speech (encryption and censorship-resistence).

I’m tired of all these text messaging silos. Email is ubiquitous because no one owns it. RCS can’t come fast enough.

If you lower the ask, you'll get more people to pay, but will it lead to more revenue in total?

In my experience, I don't think so. It's really hard to get users to pay for a free app. If you've gotten them over the activation energy required, it usually works better to ask for more. Users who contribute less also tend to churn more and cause more support burden. So you don't need just to convert 6x more at $10 / yr vs. $60 / yr but more like 10x. And 10x is really, really hard to do, ime. Again, the main thing you fight is getting users to pay anything at all.

It depends on who you are targeting.

For users willing to donate at all, the difference between (say) $2 and $5 might not be that much. Asking for more might therefore actually maximize the return.

All other users probably wouldn't donate regardless of whether it's $1 or less, so why bother considering them in your model. (edit) Offering an $1 option would just get you 0 of these users, and possibly lower the returns of the otherwise-$5-donaters above.

Same, I thought about paying but $5 is over my "sure" threshold. $10/yr would be much, much easier.

I'm in a third world country and even I would contribute $10 a year. I already contribute to Wikipedia on occasion. Making it monthly feels like too much of an obligation.

Remember, that Whatsapp in its early days used to ask for 1USD/user/year.

For what it is and how it contributes to me daily I don't believe it's high. $5/month for the peace of mind Signal provides is something I can make a case for. I subscribe to the $10/month level - because everyone in my circle uses it, and I pushed many of them in that direction. I want it to succeed, I want it to continue to improve, I want it to be available. I know I spend more than $10/month on other things that could easily be argued are far less useful than Signal.

That being said I do think there's value in a $1/month option, because that shouldn't be hard to rationalize. If something that's ad-free, operationally simple, and provides an improved level of privacy for it's users - one that requires humans and services to operate and be maintained - and still that can't be rationalized at $1/month, then the end user doesn't value what Signal is or can offer. Never mind the tradeoff one makes for "free" alternatives.

This argument always comes up, and the general conclusion is that the vast, vast, vast majority of people will never willingly donate a single penny. Those that will donate typically aren't price-sensitive.

I completely agree with you and would give, say, $12/year. But there's no way I'm giving $5/month. Luckily Signal also has a "booster" one-time donation option so I'm just going to "boost" twelve bucks. Maybe I'll remember to give again next February, who knows?

Looks like there is the option for a one-off $5 "Boost", so if you want to give $10 a year you can just give two boosts.

A simple "pay what you want" would be superior. I'd probably do $2/month for Signal. $60/year is way too much to ask and as a result, I did one month, then cancelled. Perhaps I'll do that again in six months, but maybe not.

Firstly, Random websites tell me that each Facebook user is worth on average ~$35/year on revenue figures--no indication if that was net or gross.

So, ~$5/month gross costs is appropriate when comparing it to deferred "you are the product" and taking into account cryptographers, developers, testers, system administrators, infrastructure administrators, team leads, program leads, and adding in physical infrastructure and network interconnections.

Otherwise you're just valuing against your own perception of "how much is my disposable income", which is different between any economic zone. And that's a poor argument when some people's concept of a steak dinner is a McLaren 720s that's disposable after a month.

Secondly, there are payment processor margins to take into account. At ~$60/year on 12 payments a pre-authorized standpoint, that may be less than on 1 payment of $10. I'm not interested enough to check.

You can also make single donations called "signal boosts". For example, I try to throw them a little bit of money every now and then but would not go to a subscription.

Those are defaulted to 4 6 12 25 60 125 but you can enter a custom amount.

> I'd argue that $5/month is quite high.

The minimum monthly amount is €2,66 here: https://signal.org/donate/

Kinda hack, but if you choose a different currency, the tiers are lower. (With Revolut you can use almost any currency and FX fees are 0-0.5%).

For example with PLN min tier is 12 PLN = 2.64€

I agree. I love using signal and have converted most of my friends to it, but $60/year is too high for me for a chat app. I’d pay a dollar a month, maybe two.

Anything that costs less than Netflix I'll subscribe to without thinking about it, especially if it's something like Signal that I use every day. If you don't have 5 dollars a month for them, that's fine, but I'm sure enough people do that they're doing alright.

I'd bet that they get more by asking this price from more users rather than targeting more subscribers at cheaper prices.

Isn't signal deep in debt at the moment? At least 100 millions?

How do you know the cost per user is "much, much lower"?

You might be interested in the technical reasons for requiring a phone number to use Signal. Not sure if there have been any updates since this blog post. https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/

> One challenge has been that if we added support for something like usernames in Signal, those usernames wouldn’t get saved in your phone’s address book. Thus if you reinstalled Signal or got a new device, you would lose your entire social graph, because it’s not saved anywhere else. Other messaging apps solve this by storing a plaintext copy of your address book, social graph, and conversation frequency on their servers. That way your phone can get run over by a car without flattening your social graph in those apps, but it comes at a high privacy price.

so pay for privacy?

I thought privacy was supposed to be available for free?

Requiring a phone number is literally my only complaint about Signal, I used to just use a Google Voice number but then I learned about TextNow and have been migrating away from Google as much as possible

https://www.textnow.com/how-it-works

I've paid for it once, I can see the receipt in Google play

This was early days when WhatsApp was still searching for a business model.

That business model turned out to be acquire critical mass and then be acquired, but I recall people talking about how WhatsApp was hemorrhaging money in the process.

Early adopters got life long free access... until eventually even the 99 cents was dropped.

That’s partly why I donate. If they get direct funds they’re hopefully less likely to turn to these scammy cryptocoins to keep the lights on

I wish so bad that the signal crypto integration would have been done better. They could have implemented a wallet and generated revenue in the hundreds of millions like metamask does.

Starting a new blockchain obviously has founder incentives which are great but it only makes sense when people feel like your contributing to the diversity of blockchains not simply copy pasting monero.

I'd do this in a heartbeat if they would add Lightning Network donation option.

you can still do a "signal boost," which is a one-time contribution (and also comes with a 30 day badge)

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/4408365318426-S...

So you don't have any insurances?

Capitalism gonna capitalism.

Has it? It kept source code outdated for a year while implementing support for an altcoin that their ex-CEO stands to profit from. All the while users were asking to implement stuff that's actually been requested for years.

I like Signal as a product but my opinion of the company making it has soured pretty substantially.

Same, it's a small sum, but it should probably cover it for the group chat that I'm in using signal.

> I pay a lot more for other services that I use far less often and provide me far less value, so why not pay for this

Is that the only reason why you would like to pay for this service?

It seems irrational to me to justify an expense merely by the existence of other expenses.

$3 would be worth it just to save time loggin in to PayPal to donate each month. (Or is there an automated way?)

Imo WhatsApp also should have been interoperable and without phone number obligation.

WhatsApp basically killed interoperable chat by jumping on phones and building a near-monopoly.

This is what I wish Signal was. A simple secure messenger that works with a username and not tied to an identity like phone number :-( Like HN......

Now that I'd happily pay for.

There was once Tor Messenger, but now it's dead, so I guess there is not a market for such a thing:

https://blog.torproject.org/sunsetting-tor-messenger/

https://getsession.org is a signal clone without the number requirement, just uses a session id.

E2EE voice & video conferencing is available in the beta coming in the next release

Matrix is probably the closet alternative but it's harder to use than Signal (lost your password? say goodbye to your messages!).

Threema is around and well, though it's userbase is relatively small.

> - terribly slow synchronization between phone and Desktop, catching up on a few hundred messages takes minutes

I agree with everything you wrote. In principle, I'd like to support Signal but their UX is terrible for such things. Tried using it for a group and it was so painful. My phone was constantly warning me about it chewing up battery, and message sync between the desktop app was like it was using a 14.4K modem from 1994. I simply could not use it meaningfully for group messaging. Ultimately we went back to Whatsapp. But hey, at least they fixed the Fisher Price background colours for group messages.

Here in India, everyone uses Whatsapp. There was a brief time during the Whatsapp terms of service brouhaha that a bunch of people I know said they'd move to Signal, and they've all slowly moved back to Whatsapp because that's what everyone in the country uses. Seriously, it's practically infrastructure here.

Add to the list the inability to effectively "mute" busy chats in a way where they don't continuously bubble up to the top. At least on Android, you can only pin 4 chats, I would really like to be able to pin as many as I want, effectively defining my own order of chats regardless of chronology.

Making the colors of buttons consistent seems like something that could be done as a pull request. I think all of their code is open source?

thats why i turned off background refresh option on iOS. Works well with notification instead.

I decided a few years ago that Signal was the closest thing to a good cross-platform messaging client that mortals could be expected to use. I sent an email to my most frequently texted contacts asking them to consider installing it and using it.

It’s not a huge cross-section of my friends and family that uses it, but I message a portion of my social network graph every day.

For me it's the opposite.

I'm guessing both have ways for non-profits to take donations without the normal 30% cut. Here's Apple's program: https://developer.apple.com/apple-pay/nonprofits/

I hope it doesn't stick around and goes down with WhatsApp at some point.

I don't like messengers striving for quasi monopolies

Signal Foundation is a non-profit. It is my understanding this is a 0% interest loan, not an investment. I'm no expert, but after examining their 2019 balance sheet, it seems to me like they are well on their way to paying it back.

I guess the salaries are competitive in San Francisco. Spicy!

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...