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Ente – Opening Our Books

ente.com

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Re: Ente – Opening Our Books

#22
post #8

This is one of those vanity blog posts, a “look at us, we’re open” blog posts without actual openness, or rather, limited openness where it helps their image and not openness that could backfire. Businesses don’t operate based on revenue. They operate based on profit. They operate based on operating expenses. They operate based off of free cash flow. Showing off revenue and number of accounts is showing off a tiny po…

> Businesses don’t operate based on revenue. They operate based on profit.

This does not bode well for the entire AI industry.

Re: Ente – Opening Our Books

#23

I was wringing my hands trying to decide between Ente and Immich for a while as I'm trying to de-Google. I went with Immich in the end, but Ente seems like a great alternative for anyone that doesn't want to self-host.

You can self-host Ente.

https://ente.com/help/self-hosting/

Re: Ente – Opening Our Books

#24
post #18
post #8

This is one of those vanity blog posts, a “look at us, we’re open” blog posts without actual openness, or rather, limited openness where it helps their image and not openness that could backfire. Businesses don’t operate based on revenue. They operate based on profit. They operate based on operating expenses. They operate based off of free cash flow. Showing off revenue and number of accounts is showing off a tiny po…

What's wrong with that? This is a post to show users that other people are paying for it (social proof) and that the project is developing well, similar to other projects sharing how many contributions or first time pull requests they got this month. That doesn't mean that you have to show everyones salary, how much the lunch in the office is costing and include a raw export of their bookkeeping setup. There's room f…

The accompanying blog post says "The one thing you couldn't see was how well Ente is doing as a business. Now you can."

To the parent commenter's point, we don't have enough information to know if that's true.

EDIT: the founder is on this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48933905) providing more info and explains that adding expenses on would be too burdensome.

Re: Ente – Opening Our Books

#25
post #15

I have been impressed with Ente products and customer service. It's good to see they are growing. That said, revenue information is not entirely helpful in a vacuum. I'd be more keen on seeing profit (even at a lower timeline resolution). What's the average cost for taking on a new customer? What's the retention/turnover? Etc. That said the products are great and I'd recommend them to anyone.

I wish I could say the same. I tried Ente the other day, to see how it compares to Immich, but it was very hit-and-miss. Face recognition for people never worked, no matter what I tried, for example.

I'm in the same boat. I had a so many comments under Immich videos about Ente that it made me wonder if they were just bots.

The client / server relationship with Ente is peculiar, and on my test dataset of about 1000 images did not perform at all. Face recognition, semantic search, etc, it was not in the same league as Immich tbh. (Also hi Stavros!)

Re: Ente – Opening Our Books

#26
post #22
post #8

This is one of those vanity blog posts, a “look at us, we’re open” blog posts without actual openness, or rather, limited openness where it helps their image and not openness that could backfire. Businesses don’t operate based on revenue. They operate based on profit. They operate based on operating expenses. They operate based off of free cash flow. Showing off revenue and number of accounts is showing off a tiny po…

> Businesses don’t operate based on revenue. They operate based on profit. This does not bode well for the entire AI industry.

Public IPO as Ponzi scheme/shell game is a time-honored tradition. You can operate at a loss so long as you can get folks to bet they’ll get a return. The more people you can convince, the better you can do for yourself without being left holding the bag.

Re: Ente – Opening Our Books

#27
post #25
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could say the same. I tried Ente the other day, to see how it compares to Immich, but it was very hit-and-miss. Face recognition for people never worked, no matter what I tried, for example.

I'm in the same boat. I had a so many comments under Immich videos about Ente that it made me wonder if they were just bots. The client / server relationship with Ente is peculiar, and on my test dataset of about 1000 images did not perform at all. Face recognition, semantic search, etc, it was not in the same league as Immich tbh. (Also hi Stavros!)

Hey Alex! Yes, exactly, I get that they're a fairly different category with different tradeoffs (trustless server), but also I own the server so I don't need it to be trustless. If it worked well, the tradeoff would be smaller, but as it stands it's not worth it for me over Immich.

Re: Ente – Opening Our Books

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came to the comments to say the same thing! I would love to take a seminar or a class from the folks in their design department.

I found it over blown. It took me far too long looking past the ducks to find out what Ente actually does. The design team don’t seem to be interested in the product.

Really? It seems pretty clearly written on the home page to me. (This is the first time I have heard of the company).

Re: Ente – Opening Our Books

#30
post #8

This is one of those vanity blog posts, a “look at us, we’re open” blog posts without actual openness, or rather, limited openness where it helps their image and not openness that could backfire. Businesses don’t operate based on revenue. They operate based on profit. They operate based on operating expenses. They operate based off of free cash flow. Showing off revenue and number of accounts is showing off a tiny po…

They poster goes into more details here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48933905

But also, this is not a very constructive comment. They're pushing a new product that based on the upvotes this community is interested it.

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