The Signal foundation was established in 2018 with $105 million from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, and it actively solicits donations. I give $20 a month.
They released a blog post at the end of 2023 emphasizing the need for donations and estimating operating costs would cross $50m/year in 2025.
That also what causes the problems. The sad part is that it didn't have to be this way, but being publicly listed currently means that you got to pump those stocks. Very few people invest in stocks because they believe in the long term future of a given company, that's old school thinking.
The types of stockholders that "take ownership" also isn't going to help fund the company long term. They buy the stock once and the hold on to it. How is that going to help?
WhatsApp needed to be a subscription to not go down the ads and data collection rabbit hole. Now there's no going back, more and more ads will appear and more and more tracking will sneak in. This is a Meta product after all, so I don't even understand why people are surprised.
Personally I think the small staff, donation-based funding, and security-focused security constraints are a plus: the platform seems way more stable than most and does what it needs to do.
[1]: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...