Ente: Open-Source, E2E Encrypted, Google Photos Alternative

I'm very interested in Ente's thoughts on the impact of first class support for self hosting on their revenue

Agreed, but the market of people that are not tech, care about their photos not being mined, and are willing to pay 4x the price I think is miniscule

The whole reason I'm having the conversation is that your statement is full of opinions, assumptions, and falsehoods. "not doing anything", "intended to extort people", and "hasn't seen any improvement in a very long time" are all incorrect. I can't find the truth, and I'm a truth seeker.

Let's start with the facts:

1. You have a free account and pay $0 for the service.

2. You received a few emails informing you of our choices when we changed the free account policies and limits.

3. Your choices included downloading your content, paying for the service, and/or closing your account.

4. You (and everyone) then got more time to make your choice than we'd originally said, for free.

5. Your account, for some reason, hasn't seen some of these changes, so you got even more time to make some of those choices, again for free.

None of that sounds hostile to me. I'm not sure who would consider that behavior hostile (more choices, more time, at $0 cost). Despite the depth of the conversation, I'm still struggling to understand (but, surprisingly, still open to the idea of) how we can be accused of "actual hostility".

Now, let's take your false statements:

- "not doing anything": I can assure you we've done many things, to many accounts. Using an online search engine will reveal plenty of examples. Why has your account not seen some of them? I don't know, but speculating that we haven't done "anything" is simply not true. Even your account has seen many changes, perhaps just not the one you highlight (removing your excess private photos). Try uploading more than 1000 public photos, as just one example of doing something.

- "intended to extort people": Simply not true. The choices were clear and the timeline was, and in your case, remains extremely generous. I happen to know the intent (not deleting any photos for as long as we possibly can) and you do not. Further, every action we've taken supports this intent. We didn't, and don't, hold any photos hostage for payment or anything else. There was no extortion, and there was certainly no intent to extort.

- "hasn't seen any improvement for a very long time": While it's possible you haven't seen any of YOUR preferred improvements, the list of improvements since we took over is long and consistent. We're averaging ~10 material improvements in the form of new features, upgraded features, and significant bug fixes, each month, for the last ~5 years. (Thousands of minor bug fixes, too) They're all well-documented on our blog[1] and in our help forum[2]. Our members agree, based on all of the feedback and data we see.

I typically love conversations like these, with "delightfully discontent" customers, because that's where the real value for learning and growth usually lies, not the thrilled customers I tend to meet day in & day out. I want to learn something here, so I and we can improve. It hasn't happened yet.

We clearly fucked up - you're upset, and you're bothering to engage. I just can't figure it out. Probably my fault. But I'll keep trying. :)

[1] - https://blog.flickr.net/

[2] - https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/

Thank you. Your project looks really neat! Let me know if we can ever collaborate. More great services for photographers in the world is always a great thing, especially if they avoid lock-in.

That's interesting.

I see this as a masterclass on how to fail to convert a 19 year member of a website, back to a paying customer.

Yes, I used to pay for Flickr Pro. I stopped when I found that it wasn't providing me value other than "we will delete your private photos" if you don't pay up.

By the way, I did at one point look in the UX to see if there was a way to be able to view just my private photos so that I could delete them myself, but it wasn't obvious in my searching. It felt like it was intentionally difficult to even see if I wanted to keep an account.

Never once did he ask the simple question: "What can we do to convert you into a paying customer again?". Everything has been some sort of weird truth seeking mission to prove me wrong.