New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
Makes sense, understood! Thank you for the insight I never dived too deep in the inner-workings of these.
a million dollars to run this seems a bit high
Yeah right
An app that maybe 5 people use requires $21k per month to keep even the critical infra up. Totally buying that.
On one hand, I don't fault developers wanting to get paid market-competitive wages (which for FAANG engineers can be quite a lot!) On the other hand, there is a reality that when you leave regular corporate life to go work on a passion project, especially an open source one, it comes with a corresponding step down in pay. That's just part of the inherit trade you make to work on something meaningful to you. I completely understand why Session wants to have their cake and eat it too, but they probably need to adjust their expectations.
Getting paid for open source is extra tricky. Unless you're making something a corporation relies on and is willing to get a support contract for, it's very difficult to get reliable funding.
There are only a few very companies who have reached the have the cake and eat it too and some of those are only source-available not open-source as in the OSI/FSF definition of the word.
Some of these are like Posthog, Sentry etc..
And to be honest, I think that the only ones like these are probably signal in this context because signal was previously funded for multiple years by the creator who was also part of creating and selling whatsapp for hundreds of millions of dollar to facebook thus they had the money to create an proper structure where now people themselves donate to signal as well.
Donations are an hard model for making things work sometimes.
Just a bit, yes
It costs that much because they are using AWS/Azure....
https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/
Silly of them. They could've easily cut expenses by 70% and uptime by 40% by going with ihostart
$65,000 / $7 vps/year = 9285 years funding for their critical infrastucture.
Nowadays you dont need much to build chat server applications, as most is done in the client.
They should buy some OVH chickens and take advantage of the unmetered bandwidth.
Imagine Signal running on some cheap 10 eur Kimsufi chickens lol.
"Signal spends around $2.8 million dollars per year on bandwidth to support sending messages and files (such as photos, videos, voice notes, documents, etc.) and to enable voice and video calls."
@emgh please approve this pro-OVH comment.
they should restrict media/file uploads, delete old ones, storing and sending text is cheap, and yes, move to OVH
This wint guy might be michael scott trying to impress jan after her candle making business lol (The office sitcom joke)
"Someone who is good at this economy please help me budget this, my family is dying"
That's what she said.
-Michael Scott
Signal or Molly (thats my client I use for it) is the only messenger I use on daily basis for the company and private. I also have SimpleX but I don't really use it.
Its the go to app for plugs (don't ask me how I know)
And you people comparing this with signal its nothing like it actually. Signal requires a phone number and isn't anonymous at all session runs over tor and doesn't require a phone number
Its kind like : ". . . Now we do crypto, now we at loss, pls help us. . ."
Correction: does not use Tor but its own decentralized network (Session Network).
isnt this like Telegram
Such decentralized things comes with huge costs. Though not $1M a year.
There are many decentralized apps/services which are going to sunset because of their own rising costs. Its sad to see them go away!
there is too much begging on the net. Just commercialize the services. Nothing wrong asking 7$ per year
Or just don’t use the providers with the highest bw costs for a bw intensive application
is session also doing this? I mean signal is doing it yea but what about session?
It's already commercialized.
It's a VC funded crypto company. You have to stake ($$) to run nodes to help their network. https://docs.getsession.org/session-network/staking
They've already blown through hundreds of thousands of dollars from what I recall.
I have no idea. Seems everyone is doing it tbh. Devs don’t know DevOps anymore and Vercel helped reduce the average DevOps knowledge in orgs even more.
Well, they don't even run the bandwidth-intensive parts, no?
Aren't all the actual messaging nodes run by random people with their shitcoin?
I am not even sure some attachments or something are in their australian servers. But if its run by random people, not sure how session foundation has power to just shut it off for the rest of people if its run by random people :-/ Sounds fishy.
Yeah but they can hire devs who care about proper infrastructure settings and an proper devops team.
I have heard it be described though as devs are just asked to use AWS/Vercel and I mean they can't really push back so much because its not their position to do so sometimes so they just do the work they are told and the company is ignorant on how much money it is bleeding with things like AWS