At a time when more than half the world’s population finds itself on the internet, companies have turned the privacy of individuals into commodities. They use this gathered data to personalise advertisements for each potential customer. Today, more and more individuals are growing conscious of the kind of data they share on the internet and even on private messaging platforms.
A widely used messaging application, WhatsApp, is now the source of privacy concerns. Individual users are increasingly growing sceptical about how private their conversations remain on the application. This issue had led to users shifting to other end-to-end encrypted messaging applications. One such signal app which is fast gaining popularity among users is Signal.
What is Signal? Who uses it, and what are the values that it stands by? What’s Signal business model and how does Signal make money?
Let’s find out!
What is Signal?
Signal is an encrypted messaging application that allows users to send messages and also make calls.
Signal’s USP, however, is its guaranteed focus on privacy protection in the signal business model. Since it is open-source and peer-reviewed, individual experts can check on its privacy and security. It encrypts text messages, calls, including group calls, and even gif searches.
The design of the signal app is such that a user’s privacy is highly prioritised. We see this in several ways – an example could be that of its video call feature. When the person answers a video call on the other end of the call, the user has to turn on their camera, as it doesn’t automatically turn on as it does on other messaging applications.
Growth of Signal
Signal’s privacy-first design earned the app a loyal following, but its biggest growth jumps came from outside events. Signal launched in 2014 and did not reach a wide audience until after 2018. That year, Moxie Marlinspike and WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton announced the Signal Technology Foundation in California. The Signal Foundation set out to make private messaging accessible to everyone, as their announcement post explained.
The app first broke into the mainstream during the George Floyd protests in 2020. Organizers and protesters worried about police monitoring of personal data. Signal answered with a face-blur tool that hides identities in photos. The app then saw a sharp increase in downloads.
In January 2021, Signal’s registration numbers spiked again. The trigger was WhatsApp’s new privacy policy, which sent users looking for alternatives. Elon Musk added his own push with a two-word endorsement: “Use Signal”.
Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee who leaked NSA secrets, also vouched for Signal. He had been a supporter and user of the app since 2015.
The flood of new users crashed the Signal app’s servers on January 15, 2021.
As a result of these events, the world witnessed a massive digital migration. Users moved from a messaging application that threatened privacy to a more secure messaging application.
Growth did not stop in 2021. Signups kept arriving, then settled into a steadier pace. Signal publishes no official user figures, so every number below comes from outside trackers, not the company itself.
Signal president Meredith Whittaker told NZZ that the app has 70 to 100 million monthly active users worldwide. A separate estimate from Business of Apps puts active users at 70 million in 2024. Signal had about 40 million monthly active users in January 2021, by comparison.
Download figures show the same pattern: a spike, then a plateau. Appfigures counts 193.8 million lifetime app-store downloads as of early June 2025. Annual downloads have settled near 25 to 27 million, down from the 65.7 million spike in 2021. A separate tracker, AppMagic, counted 220 million cumulative downloads in 2024.
By December 2025, Signal ranked 8th among messaging apps by monthly downloads, at 4.03 million. WhatsApp led with 3 billion monthly active users and 35.14 million monthly downloads. Telegram followed with 28.14 million monthly downloads. The migration slowed after 2021, but Signal’s user base kept growing.
Who Is Signal’s Customer?
Independent trackers put Signal between 70 and 100 million monthly active users worldwide. Lifetime app-store downloads reached 193.8 million as of early June 2025. Business of Apps estimates 70 million active users and 220 million cumulative downloads. Signal publishes no official figures, so all estimates differ.
Signal’s early growth came from users reacting to WhatsApp’s privacy policy change in 2020 and 2021. That wave peaked and receded. What followed was a broader mix of users from different age groups and professions. The audience broadened well beyond the original privacy converts.
Today the user base behind the signal business model is mixed-age rather than dominated by one generation. iOS demographic data shows Generation Z as the largest single age band, at 36.1%. That is a plurality, not a majority. Adults aged 25 to 34 make up 19.8%, while those aged 35 to 64 together account for 43.4%. Under-35s together account for about 56% of the iOS base. The spread across ages suggests Signal’s appeal extends well beyond the youngest users.
Journalists, activists, and other privacy-sensitive professionals remain the core audience. They adopted Signal because their work demands confidentiality. Their continued use anchors the user base and sustains the app’s relevance. They also encouraged others to switch, continuing the pattern seen during the earlier migration.
What Value Does Signal Provide to Its Customers?
Signal is to WhatsApp as Snapchat is to Instagram. Snapchat is a privacy centric social media platform where users conduct more private interactions with those considered close. Instagram on the other hand lets users interact with a broader audience consisting of family, friends and followers.
Signal users mainly use the application for private conversations with people who matter. WhatsApp is used for conversations the user does not necessarily consider private, including chats with businesses.
Signal’s popularity rose when Facebook, WhatsApp’s parent company, changed its privacy policy. Users who wanted no one to access their chats moved to a service that promised exactly that.
Signal promises never to sell user data. As a non-profit, the signal business model also shows no advertisements to earn revenue. In the signal vs telegram comparison, this positioned it differently from another privacy centric application, Telegram.
Signal is an open-sourced and peer-reviewed IM; its code, clients, and protocol are publicly available. The world helps improve the application’s security and functioning rather than just one company. On October 2, 2025, that scrutiny produced the Sparse Post-Quantum Ratchet. The upgrade to the Signal Protocol protects messages against future quantum-computer attacks.
The application is easy to use and requires no specialised knowledge, making it widely accessible to users globally.
Below listed are some features that Signal allows to its users for enhanced conversational privacy:
- Disappearing messages: Signal allows its users to choose how long messages stay visible, anywhere between five seconds and a week. Messages delete automatically after that.
- View-once only media: Images and videos shared from a phone disappear from the conversation once the recipient views them once.
- Encrypted backups: Signal’s local database is encrypted with the hardware keystore, so generic Android backups cannot restore Signal data on another device. That is why Signal built its own system, Signal Secure Backups: opt-in, end-to-end encrypted cloud backups launched in September 2025. The free tier covers all text messages plus 45 days of media.
- Registration lock: The application requires its users to set a PIN when registering. This prevents a second device from being added to the account and stealing the information without the user’s knowledge.
- Incognito Keyboard: The application also prevents the keyboard from sending user-typed data to a third party, preventing sensitive data from being leaked.
Signal’s Operating Model
Signal is an instant messaging application for Android and Apple smartphones, as well as for desktops. In August 2026 it gained the ability to link a second phone or tablet to one account. That removed a limitation that had made Signal impractical as a primary messenger. The app offers the following features:
- Secure messaging with end-to-end encryption: Signal pairs end-to-end encryption with an open source model. Anyone can inspect its code and protocol to confirm the encryption works as claimed. Messages are readable only at the sender’s and receiver’s ends.
- Secure voice and video calls with end-to-end encryption: Like text messages, Signal’s voice and video calls are end-to-end encrypted. Only the parties on the call can access them.
- Group chats: Users can create group chats. Invitees are first asked whether they want to be added. This differs from WhatsApp, where anyone with a contact number can add a person directly. In March 2026, Signal added group member labels that clarify roles across chats on Android, Desktop, and iOS.
- Disappearing text messages: Users set a time limit for how long a message stays visible. Viewed messages delete automatically after that window, which can range from 5 seconds to a week.
- View-once only media: Users can send photos and videos that the receiver can open only once. After the first view, the media disappears for good.
- Signal PIN: The Signal PIN lets users recover their profile, settings, contacts, and blocklist if they lose or switch a device.
- Payments: Like WhatsApp, Signal lets users send and receive money in the app. Transactions run on cryptocurrency, not fiat, and details sit on the MobileCoin ledger, which Signal cannot see. MobileCoin has since rebranded to Sentz, though the app still labels the token “MobileCoin” on its payments screen. Use is niche, and community members question why the option remains. The feature still supports the signal business model’s aim to keep user data in users’ hands.
- Polls: Signal Polls shipped on November 19, 2025.
- Pinned messages: On January 29, 2026, Signal launched pinned messages for one-to-one and group chats. Users can pin important posts to the top of a conversation.
- Linked devices: On August 4, 2026, Signal released linked devices support (Android v8.20 and iOS v8.22). One account can now pair a second Android phone or tablet. iOS can also link an iPhone in addition to iPads. One practitioner review called it the biggest usability change in years.
Signal’s Revenue Model
Signal’s app is free to use, and the organisation behind it is a non-profit. The signal business model does not aim to earn profits.
Its funding comes from donations plus a low-cost subscription for cloud backup storage. The organisation accepts all currencies and even cryptocurrencies as donations.
Signal’s code is open-source, so independent developers volunteer patches and fixes. That community work keeps engineering costs lower than they would otherwise be.
The subscription arrived on 8 September 2025, when Signal launched its first paid product, Secure Backups. It costs US$1.99 per month for up to 100GB of backup storage. A free tier still covers all text messages plus 45 days of media. Signal’s Support pages and coverage from The Verge confirm those terms. Donations still pay most of the bill, but this subscription adds a second stream.
Signal’s funding history runs through WhatsApp. Both founders of WhatsApp resigned from Facebook after disagreements over advertising on the app and a changed privacy policy. Brian Acton, one of those founders, became Signal’s executive chairman and co-founder. He invested $50 million in Signal in 2018, and his support went further than that. The Signal Foundation’s 2018 tax filing lists $105 million in liabilities, consistent with reports of an unsecured, zero-interest loan from Acton.
The foundation’s Form 990 for the fiscal year ending December 2024 shows total revenue of $29,413,537. Contributions supplied $21,843,492, or 74.3% of that revenue. Program services added $6,386,666, or 21.7%, and investment income contributed $677,712.
Expenses reached about $38 million against that $29.4 million of revenue. Net assets fell to negative $4,724,975, down from positive $3,331,641 the prior year. The foundation spent more than it took in during 2024, and donations no longer cover the full budget.
Executive compensation totaled $1,404,888 across the filing. President Meredith Whittaker received $743,531 of that sum. Co-founder Brian Acton took $0.
Future of Signal
Signal’s non-profit structure means the organization can never be sold or taken over. The team states that it holds no access to user data. The Signal app continues to prioritize privacy and security above everything else. The post-quantum upgrade, shipped straight to every user, shows that mission is still the priority.
That mission is not sitting still. The latest release cycle filled gaps users have cited for years. Secure Backups, polls, pinned messages, and stronger linked-device support all arrived in quick succession. The work is aimed squarely at mainstream usability, not just at privacy purists.
But product polish has not solved the hardest problem. In a 2026 r/IndiaTech thread, users called Signal “a proper daily driver.” The praise was consistent: solid end-to-end encryption and no data mining. The catch is the network effect, not technical: friends and family stayed on WhatsApp. A separate r/signal thread on going mainstream put it plainly. WhatsApp and iMessage hold the vast majority of market share, and moving people across is “incredibly difficult.”
Signal’s own community is not settled on the signal business model. A thread on Signal’s financial future has users debating whether donations can sustain the organization. Commenters question executive compensation relative to the budget. The Signal Foundation’s most recent tax filing showed it spending more than it takes in. Technical users on Hacker News are similarly divided. They credit the progress on linked devices and backups, but resent that backups are Signal-operated rather than user-controlled.
Signal’s privacy position is stronger than ever. Converting that respect into everyday usage remains unsolved, and how the organization funds itself stays a live question.
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