Signal operating costs will be approximately $50 million in 2025

Chat service Signal needs about 50 million dollars per year by 2025 to continue running. The non-profit organization behind the service wants to attract even more small and medium-sized donors so that it can continue to raise funds in a safe way.

The non-profit organization behind the chat service writes in a blog post that it must spend $14 million annually to keep its infrastructure running. With that amount, Signal can, among other things, maintain its global server network, purchase sufficient bandwidth and purchase SMS messages that are used for user authentication. The chat service believes that its encrypted communication technology means that more bandwidth is needed and therefore more money is spent on purchasing it.

Signal’s personnel costs are estimated at approximately $19 million per year. The company has three teams responsible for the development, support and maintenance of Signal for Android, iOS and the desktop environment. A total of fifty people are employed full-time by the chat service.

The organization believes that they are quite economical compared to other popular chat services that, according to Signal, respect the privacy of users to a much lesser extent. “This is an industry where free consumer technology almost always comes with surveillance and invasion of privacy,” it said. The organization says it does not want to know anything about this and therefore wants to evolve towards a financing model in which it counts on a large number of small and medium-sized donors. According to Signal, that would be the safest way of fundraising.