> I'd drop these features if possible, or give them to donors.
They can't really do that, it deters adoption of something with a network effect.
The real issue here is that direct connections have privacy implications (maybe you don't want the other party to know your IP address), so they relay everything. If they could solve that they could save a lot of money.
For example, detect if the user is connected via a known VPN service (which is likely given Signal's user base) and then let the VPN hide the user's IP address instead of Signal having to pay for it. Or make a deal with popular VPNs to put the relay servers in their data centers, which gives a similar advantage and they might be able to get better pricing from them in general because the VPNs already have a lot of bandwidth, are sympathetic to what Signal does and could use it as PR.
Still doesn't work. Any two people don't have a pro account and they stop using it in favor of a competitor, and then their other contacts use the competitor too. You can't charge for something WhatsApp has for free.
They can't really do that, it deters adoption of something with a network effect.
The real issue here is that direct connections have privacy implications (maybe you don't want the other party to know your IP address), so they relay everything. If they could solve that they could save a lot of money.
For example, detect if the user is connected via a known VPN service (which is likely given Signal's user base) and then let the VPN hide the user's IP address instead of Signal having to pay for it. Or make a deal with popular VPNs to put the relay servers in their data centers, which gives a similar advantage and they might be able to get better pricing from them in general because the VPNs already have a lot of bandwidth, are sympathetic to what Signal does and could use it as PR.