I have no idea about the funding situation of Wire. I thought I'd read about it being VC funded. It also has paid subscriptions for businesses, though how big that is and how fast it's growing are not known. Signal's funding is only a recent event, and one could ask how long that would last too, since Signal doesn't even have a paid service.

Having seen may messaging services come and go, I wouldn't in the least bit be surprised if either of these disappeared in a decade or a decade and a half from now.

That makes Wire an especially hard sell, since it risks not just going away, but also being converted to something more nefarious.

> Signal's funding is only a recent event, and one could ask how long that would last too, since Signal doesn't even have a paid service.

Recency doesn't make a difference for users considering joining it now (only for why they may not have joined previously). $50M should be plenty to run a service for, say, 10 years, assuming they don't hire a huge number of employees.

As Wikimedia has demonstrated, a paid service isn't required to survive long-term. Certainly, users (and maybe companies) would be willing to donate to a non-profit foundation, whereas doing so to a for-profit company like Wire seems implausible.

Especially in the context of the OP article, the source of the funding of the app and service is pertty important, as it informs the motives, and for-profit motives generally seem to have been, historically, not in the best interests of the users.