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Ente – Opening Our Books

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Re: Ente – Opening Our Books

#71

Post by dismalaf »

gortok wrote: 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.

The most difficult part of a consumer SaaS or really selling anything on the internet is acquiring customers.

Zero revenue = zero profit automatically with no ability to ever make a profit.

If a startup has paying customers there's at least the chance to become profitable.

Re: Ente – Opening Our Books

#72

Post by xnickb »

thevillagechief wrote: post #65
Batman8675309 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man I love this kind of "evidence" that can't be dismissed, that is ultimately just a big "just trust me bro".

Does this really need any evidence? There's lots of businesses that are in this situation, ambling along for years until they run out of runway. Not saying anything about the original blog. There are even actual fraud cases you can look up.

Yeah I don't understand why people jumped on this. Thread-OP was saying pretty obvious if not trivial things. Without knowing how much they spend knowing how much they earn is a useless data point.

Re: Ente – Opening Our Books

#73

Post by jm4 »

AnonHP wrote: post #11
vishnukvmd wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ente.com/open is fully automated. Publishing operating costs will create operational overhead, since we've to manually consolidate, label and publish expense records. Not excited about doing that right now, but would like to in the future. Currently we've runway for a few years, and a margin of ~70% – entirety of which is reinvested into building Ente.

If your margins are about 70%, do you have any plans to reduce your prices? Compared to other photo storage platforms, your pricing seems a lot higher. End to end encryption seems to be the only USP when a person looks at your hosted offering.

70% is not unreasonable gross margin. What makes you think that’s a reason to ask that they lower prices? That 70% has to cover a lot of expenses.

Re: Ente – Opening Our Books

#74

Post by cdman »

stavros wrote: post #15
pseufaux wrote: post #10

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.

Who knows what the problem could be - if you want to invest time into this, you could try collecting some debug logs to see if it indicates anything. For me and my family it works pretty well (~300G of data across 10s of thousands of photos / videos). Face recognition / AI search works reasonably well. It's not perfect, but I'm happy to keep our photos under our control rather with some big tech company which could decide on a whim to erase all of my data (or even worse, report me to the police and then erase all of my data).

Of course I also dump all of the data about once per week on a NAS, just in case :)

Re: Ente – Opening Our Books

#75

Post by cdman »

stavros wrote: post #61
0x6c6f6c wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing self-hosted immich and a truly E2EE hosted platform like Ente is really odd. There are massively different trade-offs and target customers between these. Ente is a private hosted photo storage and sharing platform. Only trusted devices that can decrypt /encrypt would even be able to perform the kind of work to tag photos for face recognition, and in this category I'm not aware of any hosted alyermative that…

I agree it's not. It's just that, for someone who doesn't need the trustless architecture, it doesn't make sense to go with Ente right now, because it doesn't work as well. I could overlook the missing features if the ones that are there worked, but face recognition just got stuck for me and never finished.

Here is my use-case for a trustless architecture: there are parts of my families digital life which I would prefer to continue working as much as possible, even if I'm temporarily or permanently unavailable. "Pay this amount of money monthly/yearly for this to keep working" is a straight forward concept for 99.999% of the population. "Poke around in docker debugging logs if this stuff stuff" is not.

And, if stuff has to be hosted by third parties for me, I prefer it to be encrypted.

Re: Ente – Opening Our Books

#76

Post by stavros »

cdman wrote: post #74
stavros wrote: 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.

Who knows what the problem could be - if you want to invest time into this, you could try collecting some debug logs to see if it indicates anything. For me and my family it works pretty well (~300G of data across 10s of thousands of photos / videos). Face recognition / AI search works reasonably well. It's not perfect, but I'm happy to keep our photos under our control rather with some big tech company which could d…

Hm really? I had about 30 photos in it and face recognition just got completely stuck.

Re: Ente – Opening Our Books

#77

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

inigyou wrote: post #44
jadbox wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Showing off revenue and number of accounts is showing off a tiny portion of the picture" Showing revenue is not "tiny" by any means. Considering that the vast majority of businesses hide this from the public, I think it's very notably "something larger than tiny". > "but practically speaking [they] are broke" How do you know this?

Is it really hard to imagine a business with 20MM revenue and 21MM expenses?

Not hard at all, virtually every tech unicorn spent more than their revenue. Famously today it's all the AI companies.

Re: Ente – Opening Our Books

#78

Post by Grombobulous »

dewey wrote: post #18
gortok wrote: 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…

I’ll also add that private companies don’t have to do this at all.

So, yes, by comparison, this is very open.

Is it marketing material? Also yes. People who are considering using a small scale alternative to tech giant products will probably look at this and say “oh, this product has some traction, and this isn’t a fly by night business.”

Re: Ente – Opening Our Books

#79

Post by Grombobulous »

AnonHP wrote: post #11
vishnukvmd wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ente.com/open is fully automated. Publishing operating costs will create operational overhead, since we've to manually consolidate, label and publish expense records. Not excited about doing that right now, but would like to in the future. Currently we've runway for a few years, and a margin of ~70% – entirety of which is reinvested into building Ente.

If your margins are about 70%, do you have any plans to reduce your prices? Compared to other photo storage platforms, your pricing seems a lot higher. End to end encryption seems to be the only USP when a person looks at your hosted offering.

That’s not the only unique selling point.

It’s a very refined and feature-complete product with e2ee. Many alternatives just don’t have feature parity…Ente has been of the few alternative apps where you can say “it has everything important Google/Apple Photos has.”

It has desktop apps, which a number of alternatives don’t have.

It has automated continuous plain-directory export for making your 3-2-1 backup that uses different media.

The high pricing is just something I would expect from someone who isn’t a giant tech company. There are very few companies who beat pricing from places like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Re: Ente – Opening Our Books

#80

Post by alexktz »

Cider9986 wrote: post #49
alexktz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

I'm not a bot :)

That's exactly what a bot would say. ~_~
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