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 portion of the picture, and says nothing about the health of a business.
If you’re looking to ‘be open’ about the health of your business, then the operating costs would be shared, the amount the founders are ‘taking out’ of the business in dividends would be shared.
There are businesses that operate 20MM a year in revenue, but practically speaking are broke, because of the way the business is being run.
So for folks that don’t know better, this is a very cool thing ente is doing. For folks that run businesses and know better, this is a way to show off and ‘gain cred’ without actually having to be open about how the business operates.
> "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".
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
If you were being fair, designers typically don't decide the website strategy or write the copy. Ente's site seems heavily optimized for a search-driven funnel – they are targeting people explicitly searching for 'photo storage.' When that's your primary acquisition channel, you can afford to be less pedantic about copy variety. They keep the copy incredibly sparse and let the context do the heavy lifting, there is also no need to repeat descriptions on-site when that context is already handled by the search description and App Store links. When people arrive on the site, they know what they've found.
In terms of the design, they cut through a lot of the bullshit developers and designers do on the web. The execution is great and there are a lot of high-fidelity details: the scale is on point, the text hierarchy is great, the use of colour is smart, it has a fantastic, almost brochure-like layout, and generally, the design is consistent throughout and plays an important role in customer experience and branding their product.
You're not their customer, they're not targeting Hacker News as a potential sales funnel. If your takeaway is the design team isn't interested in the product, I hope to God you don't work in web.
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.
This is cool, I was looking into Ente to supplement Google Photos (I got 6k of my kid's photos, my Google account is associated with too many things and I worry about losing access).
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 our gross margin. We have expenses outside of infrastructure (people, ops, marketing, ...).
We have to reduce our prices, to make Ente's products accessible to a wider audience. But right now the focus is on building a sustainable business and increasing the probability of this business outliving us.
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 portion of the picture, and says nothing about the health of a business.
If you’re looking to ‘be open’ about the health of your business, then the operating costs would be shared, the amount the founders are ‘taking out’ of the business in dividends would be shared.
There are businesses that operate 20MM a year in revenue, but practically speaking are broke, because of the way the business is being run.
So for folks that don’t know better, this is a very cool thing ente is doing. For folks that run businesses and know better, this is a way to show off and ‘gain cred’ without actually having to be open about how the business operates.
> "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?
>> "but practically speaking [they] are broke"
> How do you know this?
They were not claiming a fact, they were posing a hypothetical.
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 for both.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!)
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.
Kinda unrelated, but the art direction on Ente's site is really top-notch.
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.
If you were being fair, designers typically don't decide the website strategy or write the copy. Ente's site seems heavily optimized for a search-driven funnel – they are targeting people explicitly searching for 'photo storage.' When that's your primary acquisition channel, you can afford to be less pedantic about copy variety. They keep the copy incredibly sparse and let the context do the heavy lifting, there is also no need to repeat descriptions on-site when that context is already handled by the search description and App Store links. When people arrive on the site, they know what they've found.
In terms of the design, they cut through a lot of the bullshit developers and designers do on the web. The execution is great and there are a lot of high-fidelity details: the scale is on point, the text hierarchy is great, the use of colour is smart, it has a fantastic, almost brochure-like layout, and generally, the design is consistent throughout and plays an important role in customer experience and branding their product.
You're not their customer, they're not targeting Hacker News as a potential sales funnel. If your takeaway is the design team isn't interested in the product, I hope to God you don't work in web.
> Safe home for your photos
This isn't clear?
Really? It seems pretty clearly written on the home page to me. (This is the first time I have heard of the company).
Happy to be one of those people contributing those numbers! :) It's a great privacy friendly service.
Are there any other self-hostable E2EE cloud products as good as Ente? This company is great. AGPL as well.
What do you like about AGPL in this context? Building a similar product and curious! Thanks
What a refreshingly unique website!
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/
This is great - would love to see more data tho! I guess they are shy to post EBITDA, infra costs?
Hi, answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48933905
This is cool, I was looking into Ente to supplement Google Photos (I got 6k of my kid's photos, my Google account is associated with too many things and I worry about losing access).
$1M ARR seems low though.
This is so cool. Congratulations! Have you considered opening operating costs as well?
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 our gross margin. We have expenses outside of infrastructure (people, ops, marketing, ...).
We have to reduce our prices, to make Ente's products accessible to a wider audience. But right now the focus is on building a sustainable business and increasing the probability of this business outliving us.
Ente feels a lot like Smugmug did back then.
Thanks, I'm a fan of Smugmug :)