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Napkin Math
A living wage is the target minimum salary for all workers, regardless of their position. The ideal minimum target salary for any position would be the market rate for that position or the living wage, whichever is higher.
Assume services are offered in the range of $5/mo. per user, or $60/year per user.
Sustainable annual revenue would then require a minimum of 1000 users ($60,000) per worker ($50,000), with the remaining amount covering infrastructure costs and other business expenses.
It is entirely possible to serve 1000 email customers on ~$250/mo. of server capacity.
I don't know where exactly different breakpoints would fall, but serving 2000 customers isn't that different from serving 1000. User growth allows for some combination of wage increases, hiring, and expansion of capacity.
The workload should not scale linearly. To some point, each additional worker can probably double the number of users that could be reliably supported, allowing wage increases, improved infrastructure, etc.
As of 2023 Proton mail had ~400 staff and ~70 million users. 3) A ratio of 1:175,000.
To be clear, I'm only thinking in the 1~5 worker scale at the moment :)