We had hoped this day would never come, but Session has now entered its final 90 days of operation. If we are unable to reach our funding goal within this period, the Session Technology Foundation (STF) will be forced to shut down.
To date, the STF has received approximately $65,000 in donations. This is enough to maintain critical Session infrastructure for the next 90 days. We are extremely grateful for the support Session has received from the community, but unfortunately this is not sufficient to retain full-time developers. As a result, all paid staff and developers will have their final working day on April 9, 2026. After this date, some team members will continue on a primarily volunteer basis to help maintain Session until July 8, 2026.
Sounds like bad planning. There are like 3 other e2ee messengers that are open source and have enough funding to operate for years without doing appeal-to-emotion dona-… extortion campaigns
It’s a scam, they don’t even refund donations if they don’t make the target. Why are their operating costs so high? This is such a red-flag, they need to shutdown regardless.
Look at the amount that Signal spends.
https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/
Their top 6 earners all get more than half a million per year and all of their infrastructure is hosted on Amazon and Google servers so it’s not really “signal” that’s expensive.
Infrastructure can’t be run on thin air, Signal isn’t peer to peer, so infrastructure is essential.
Oh yea not denying that they need servers. But do they really need to rent them from Google and Amazon instead of hosting their own? Seems like pretty poor use of donations.
They talk about it in their blog post which I have linked, go read it.
I’m not who you are talking to originally, but as lot of that is just kinda nonsense. They say they can’t have their own servers in DCs around the world cause it would cost too much…. But it wouldn’t, that’s just incorrect. They’re clearly spending 1.3 million on s3 data and the short file lifetime is killing them. If they just bought drive capacity and hosted on VPSes around the world they’d likely have a much much smaller bill. Yeah it sounds scary, but they’re already doing scary stuff.
Well, when talking about server costs, Threema somehow has been running on a 5€ lifetime license and business customer subscribtions for over a decade.
While briar and simplex are peer to peer and have nearly no ops costs.
Sure, it can be made to be very expensive, but I’m arguing that doing so is a business/design decision.
Servers can help improve the UX, but are expensive. Threema for example, only stores media on their servers temporarely, so they have way lower storage cost with a small tradeoff in userfriendlyness (of having to migratethe old media files you want to keep when you get a new phone). And so on.
If your nonprofit only has 65k, don’t hire multiple devs and provide nice-to-have features that lead to high ops expenses in servers and storage. It’s called minimal viable prpduct for a reason.
Sorry, but you’re inherently wrong.
We’re not.
Most users doesn’t even donate 1€ when using free messengers.
They don’t offer ANY “nice-to-have” features 😭 You can’t even edit send messages, which I consider to be a basic reasonable feature (which is technically difficult to implement when having E2EE, etc. in mind)
Huh? You linked me an article where server cost is the lions share of signal operation.
How does signal operate then.
If they don’t have high server costs, unlike the example from the article you brought up, they should hire cheaper software engineers from a different country or scale down development and have a longer runway.
Like I said - them having this problem is probably due to poor planing.
I’ve read the article too and it also just seems badly designed. Their “storage costs” are most likely due to short s3 file lifetimes and so they’re literally just getting killed on storage for no reason. If they rented VPS space across the planet and just used normal hard drives their costs would likely drop instantaneously.