I will comment on an interesting article from Meredith Whittaker and Joshua Lund breaking down the cost of running a large-scale messaging platform.
It estimates that the cost to operate Signal messaging will reach 50 million dollars per year in 2025.
🔗 Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive
As of the end of 2023, the cost breakdown for running a large messaging platform like Signal was as follows:
- Storage: $1.3 million per year (9.3%). It is interesting to note that Signal does not store message history on the server. Message history is stored on the client.
- Servers: $2.9 million per year (20.7%). Cost of cloud servers to support the messaging service.
- Registration Fees: $6 million per year (42.9%). This is the cost required to validate phone numbers and perform other validations.
- Total Bandwidth: $2.8 million per year (20.0%).
- Additional Services: $700,000 per year (5.0%). Uptime monitoring, outage alerts, redundant capacity for disaster recovery purposes, maintenance contracts, etc.
Infrastructure Costs (as of November 2023): Approximately $14 million per year, to support between 40 and 50 million monthly active users.
And this is just for the infrastructure costs ! You need to add all the associated costs to operate an organization employing more than 50 people.
This article is interesting on several accounts:
- If you want to run a messaging platform at scale, we can help you with that, but be sure to properly assess your operating costs as well. Ensure your ambition aligns with your business model.
- This also shows the impact of the centralized approach vs a federated model. With a centralized model, the organization running the platform has to assume all the costs for operating the platform. In a federated model like XMPP, the costs can be split across the whole network.
The technical design of a messaging service significantly impacts the operational costs of the platform. Therefore, it’s crucial to make business model and technical choices simultaneously and be flexible to adapt to platform growth, as they are two sides of the same coin. Aligning these decisions ensures that both financial sustainability and technical feasibility are achieved.
