The corollary for this is as a user, you should determine whether or not the business you are planning to depend on has a business model before you choose to depend on them. If there is no apparent income stream, then the business will close at some point and you may as well skip all the heartburn and choose not to use that business for anything you care about. BlueSky, I'm looking at you right now.
Not in tech you don't. The business plan these days is try and get as much investment money as you can to redistribute to your friends, have a few parties, hand out some Macbooks and try to get acquired by Google before your runway runs out.
I know you're trying to be snarky, but this is itself a business plan and will impact how the company is operated.
My last job was one of these. Everyone except the CEO and one designer quit. The money was drying up, CEO spent all his time chasing flashy big name customers who didn't want anything to do with us while ignoring customers begging to buy our product.
That's not a reasonable definition. The distrust in the institution is actually a side effect of questioning the authority for authority sake. Anarchists aren't a bunch of individualists that want to burn down whatever we've got in terms of mechanisms in the society regardless if they are necessary. It's just the manifestation of the dialectical opposite of the expression of power and authority.
And privacy enthusiasts just know very well that power shifts and what once was a necessary mechanism can be abused by an elected authoritarian leader.
That's a mighty broad brush you're painting with over there.
I just checked and they claim to have moved their infra to Switzerland.
There are many other issues, some I've forgotten about since I would never trust it in the first place. They also require a phone number even!
Seeing them go, I feel neutral. It's always good to have more anonymity software, just not this for me.
Vast majority of products and services can continue on or near zero, with slow or zero velocity.
Really, you can't fire half the team if you have to and keep operating?
1.75M MAU requires very small infrastructure.
An anecdote I have: a friend once had narcotics shipped intl. through Session a few years ago.
Why not outsource this to a cheaper country? For example, here in Germany salaries are about half of that, and the talent pool is excellent.
The gross income to the employee might be 75k in Germany, but the cost to the employer is roughly twice that amount in turn.
In my (very naive) mental model, US salaries are higher, have less "overhead" for the employer, but leave more responsibility (healthcare, retirement) to the employee.
What true though is that after taxes you might just receive 60% of your total salary once you deduct taxes and insurances.
Unfortunately this time, AI does not have vacations, healthcare, retirement or bills to pay and is available 24/7, 365 days on demand.
Many companies only see this as an opportunity to cut down on employees in 2026 and Session will do the same.
So that is why to answer your question:
> ...Germany is one of the most expensive countries for employing white collar jobs?
The main reason why the downsizing will continue until "AGI" is achieved internally.
So $150k+ is overpriced.
> In most markets Senior developers often command salaries exceeding $150,000 USD per year
Not really, there's basically a single sub-market in the US market where that is the norm.
Even a decade ago, seniors could easily be pulling 120-150k in markets like Houston/Atlanta/Miami/etc... The relatively cheap markets.
I'm in Atlanta and I'd actually say 150k is a lowball offer for a senior in this market at this point. I'd expect 175k+.
Now - the flip side of this is that current competition is fairly insane with all the recent tech layoffs. So it's possible we're seeing some market correction. But I don't really think it's going to come down much. Between inflation and rising costs... 150k just isn't what it used to be. If it comes down... it's going to be because we're entering a real depression.
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The amount of money the US government has printed in the last 7 years is... insane. And while it was starting to taper back down in 2023 and early 2024... then we got the GOP, and the GOP is objectively bad with money (not that the dems are that much better...). So m1 supply is rising at a relatively steady rate again.
We going to feel the consequences for a LONG time (or very, very badly for a medium time... with unknown results).
I actually ran a few numbers based on current costs. If you're making $120K/yr in Florida and paying the average cost for a 1-bedroom rental in Tampa ($1,642/mo, as of April 2026 according to Apartments.com), your after-tax take home is $98 (24% federal tax bracket, no state tax) and you have $78.4K after rent. If you're making $180K/yr in California and paying the average cost for a 1-bedroom rental in San Jose ($2,705/mo), your after-tax take home is $130.5K (24% federal tax bracket, 9.3% CA state tax bracket) and you have $98K left after housing.
You can keep fiddling with the numbers, but in most cases, the premium for getting a tech job in Silicon Valley is sufficiently high that you really are making more in absolute dollars despite the higher cost of living.
When you've got 90 days till the doors close you cant be picky about your hiring pool.
Once the server and other costs have been paid, the have money for... maybe a part-time junior in Cambodia.
That salary would be above the median for most perm senior dev positions in London, but still well within the usual range for established tech companies and well-funded startups.
I also had a contract in Switzerland for a brief, beautiful moment and in 2020 it was not weird to have an hourly rate exceeding 90CHF/h in this role.
Permanent employees were making anywhere in the range of 100-130k CHF, so the 140k USD figure is close adjusted for inflation.
How does that look when you correct for costs of living, because I imagine that would put London at the bottom of the list, as one of those places where senior-level tech salary is not enough to afford living in the city itself (and I don't mean the City of London, but the rest of it too).
"Session is an end-to-end encrypted messenger that protects your private data. A decentralized app designed, built, and operated by a global community of privacy experts."Donations are fine, but something needs to change or people are just propping up a non-viable business.
Support told me that login method had been around for a while, and I didn’t know it. So suddenly, I was locked out and couldn’t access MY ACCOUNT. I used to promote Session, but since their support response was basically a big “fuck you,” I say “fuck you too,” and I hope people switch to SimpleX.
Grounding identity in a phone number is very reasonable for almost all normal usage. It makes recovery simple. It does block the ultra paranoid use cases though. Oh well.
Session aims to provide anonymity, Signal aims to provide privacy.
Yeah if you compare that with Facebook messenger and other such services but if you want secure communication it's not reasonable.
Obviously, I'm not really claiming that it's not possible people are experiencing this issue, but it can't possibly be widespread.
I feel like most likely people are using android skins that aggressively kill apps in the background.
In many jurisdictions, telecoms form an abusive oligopoly, and you need to provide a state-issued identity document to get a phone number.
That is not at all reasonable for normal usage - unlike well-known non-abusive authentication methods, such as a keypair; or its even simpler cousin, the username/password.
On top of that so many other things just inherently expect one to have a phone number. It would be somewhat odd to not have a phone number for most of the people I know and talk to through platforms like Signal.
So to your question of which is easier, having the state ID and a phone number is easier because I'll already have that for a multitude of reasons.
If you live in a place where its rare to have a phone number, then yes I agree Signal probably isn't a good choice.
It's worth mentioning that Session had started out as a fork of signal.
For this reason, it's hard to trust them. The encryption quality is irrelevant if the slop coded client is blasting random photos to random contacts.
Certainly, there were enough people making money through it that they should have been able to cover operating expenses. How did they go about appealing for donations - was there a notification inside the app, or did they rely on word of mouth?
Translation:
Our product makes no money, has no use case and we need $1M to survive.
Two ways a PE "cost saver" would fix this:
1. Claude + 1x senior engineer (in India).
2. CTO + Claude and no senior engineers / employees.
Given we have (allegedly) achieved "AGI" (heavily disputed) they don't need as many employees.
Especially those that are after $150k+ which when you can vibe code with Claude for less than $10k anyway. /s
Job done.