Signal Secure Backups

FTA: “This is the first time we’ve offered a paid feature. The reason we’re doing this is simple: media requires a lot of storage, and storing and transferring large amounts of data is expensive”

Those costs are for doing backups to their servers. If this supported making encrypted backups to Google drive/OneDrive/iCloud/etc, they wouldn’t have those costs, and, AFAICT, that would not be less secure, given (also FTA):

“At the core of secure backups is a 64-character recovery key that is generated on your device. This key is yours and yours alone; it is never shared with Signal’s servers. Your recovery key is the only way to “unlock” your backup when you need to restore access to your messages. Losing it means losing access to your backup permanently, and Signal cannot help you recover it.”

⇒ I think it’s more of “we were looking for a new revenue stream, and picked this as a way to get that”

There’s nothing wrong with that, but presenting it as “to get secure backups, we have to make costs” is disingenuous.

> ⇒ I think it’s more of “we were looking for a new revenue stream, and picked this as a way to get that”

This seems highly implausible given the 2 USD/mo pricing, the existence of a free storage plan, and the non-negligible operating costs that obviously do exist.

I'd be interested if you have data that supports the idea of the economics working out though.

I do not have data, but I do have arguments.

If the economics do not work out, why did they chose to create infrastructure and take on the burden of supporting it instead of implementing backups to the popular cloud providers, and not having that extra operational burden?

Also, iCloud gives individuals 2 terabytes of storage for $11 a month. OneDrive and Google Drive are similar. S3 is less than 3 cents/gigabyte (with extra costs for reads and writes)

I guesstimate backups will take less than 100GB per user. At Apple’s consumer pricing that is slightly over half a dollar.

So, if they buy storage at bulk and get a sufficiently high number of customers, I do not see why they couldn’t make money on $2/month.