Hey, really appreciate such thoughtful reply. I’ll address your questions while explaining our design decisions and how Blip works.
We set Blip to use email addresses because we wanted to make it convenient for people who are less tech savvy and for business customers who need to quickly find and know who they’re sending files to. If you sign in on another device, all your other devices and recent people are just a click away—so you don’t need to set up or sync that list by yourself.
Blip is a local-first app in the sense that it works with files on your devices, but the interactions are server-driven, letting you negotiate transfers with your devices and other people, no matter where they are. When transferring files, we try to connect devices directly over IP, but when that’s not possible (and it often is not) we relay files over our servers. We use TLS 1.3 to encrypt files in transit. When devices are connected directly, we use mTLS for an even higher level of security. We plan on adding full E2EE in the future.
We care a lot about speed! We don’t throttle transfer speeds when devices are connected directly. Sending files on home Wi-Fi should be as fast as possible, as long as devices can ping each other. Reduced speeds only apply when using our relay network. If demand is high, business customers get priority to ensure their work is delivered on time.
Our business model is still very much evolving. Our main goal was to structure it in a way where people who benefit from Blip commercially should be supporting it the most. We considered a licensing model, but Blip relies on infrastructure maintenance and continuous development, so we need everyone on the latest and most secure version. We decided to make a clear distinction between community and business users, because we learned there’s more demand for speed at work. Of course, if community users start experiencing slow speeds (in practice, this hasn’t been the case), we’d love too bring this to personal users to. One way is for one-time donations to provide high-speed data boosts. Since personal users don’t require extra support and business features, pricing can be more affordable.
All that said, it’s so good to know that speed matters! Our goal has always been to make Blip the fastest way to send files.
Thanks again for the feedback, and for the heads-up on the typo—already fixed! :)