Signal’s president reveals the cost of running the privacy-preserving platform—not just to drum up donations, but to call out the for-profit surveillance business models it competes against.
It’s all explained in the document, basically the telecom companies realized that people do not send SMS anymore and that the value of them lies now on the companies that need to send you verification texts and other automated messages, as a consequence, they inflated the cost of those to extract as much money as they can. The document also describes fraudsters that register numbers en masse to drive SMS traffic on a particular network and then make money of the fees.
These guys are way smarter than me and have clearly thought about this, but 15% of your operating costs seems wildly high for verifying phone numbers.
It’s all explained in the document, basically the telecom companies realized that people do not send SMS anymore and that the value of them lies now on the companies that need to send you verification texts and other automated messages, as a consequence, they inflated the cost of those to extract as much money as they can. The document also describes fraudsters that register numbers en masse to drive SMS traffic on a particular network and then make money of the fees.