Chat service Signal needs roughly $50 million annually by 2025 to keep it running. The nonprofit behind this service wants to attract more small and medium-sized donors so it can continue to raise money in a safe way.

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

Signal’s employee costs are estimated at about $19 million annually. The company has three teams responsible for the development, support, and maintenance of Signal for Android, iOS, and desktop environments. A total of fifty people are employed full time at the chat service.

The organization believes that it is very economical compared to other popular chat services that, according to Signal, respect users’ privacy to a much lesser extent. “This is an industry where free consumer technology always comes with surveillance and invasion of privacy,” she said. The organization says that it does not want to know anything about this matter, and therefore wants to develop towards a funding model in which it relies on a large number of small and medium-sized donors. According to Signal, this will be the safest way to collect donations.