> nobody is able to fund huge servers with millions of users without infinite money. For example, Signal and Telegram are both struggling with that currently
I'm willing to believe that this is true for Telegram, since they do pretty much everything on the server. With Signal, though, message databases and most business logic are client-side, so the servers are surprisingly dumb and lean. Signal spends way more on salaries and wages than on its servers. In 2019, Signal paid more to Twilio for SMS verification than it did to AWS for hosting: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
I'm willing to believe that this is true for Telegram, since they do pretty much everything on the server. With Signal, though, message databases and most business logic are client-side, so the servers are surprisingly dumb and lean. Signal spends way more on salaries and wages than on its servers. In 2019, Signal paid more to Twilio for SMS verification than it did to AWS for hosting: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...