[hutzlibu]

Well in the case of Telegram, you can trust, that they store your data on their server, because they say so.

And it is convenient, because you can just switch your smartphone and still access all your chathistory, without having to manually backup/restore.

But Telegram in general does not have a business model yet, so just assume, that one day, they want(or have) to cash out.

Signal on the other hand is a non-profit foundation and pretty open on what they are doing. That creates trust for me.

[jakub_g]

Durov wrote his thoughts on monetization lately here: https://t.me/durov/142

[iamben]

IIRC the business model was going to be the GRAM coin/TON network, which was P2P transactions, dropbox style storage etc.

[SulfurHexaFluri]

I thought that got shut down by the US government for being a scam.