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Comment by short_sells_poo | Hacker News Reader

This looks interesting but how are they going to make money if it is free? I looked for an option to pay but couldn't find it.

Perhaps I'm jaded but I intensely distrust any service that is free (as in free beer), because it's raison d'être is unclear and unpredictable.

E.g. I liked WhatsApp while you could use it for free and see ads, or you could pay a fee and avoid the ads. It's clear. You could opt to pay for a product or be the product and get a service in return.

Here it's not immediately clear.

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This dates back to 2014, but there's an GitHub issue with an answer to this question:

https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/788

Slightly more recently in 2015 there was this blog post:

https://keybase.io/blog/2015-07-15/keybase-raises-series-a

The salient point is:

> In two simple steps: (1) we hope to earn a reputation for creating superior, simple crypto clients.

> Then, (2) some people may turn to us for more advanced, hosted solutions. That could be anything from team management (in the enterprise) to hosting of public, signed files.

> On this second idea, we are already working on something big and filesystemy, designed to address pain points for developers first. That product will be free for everyone, unless you need massive storage.

They have no revenue model currently other than maybe at some point charging for storage. So they are similar to Slack (i.e. a for profit company) except their encryption is a bit more interesting and I'd pick Keybase if I cared about not storing a lot of unencrypted data in Slack's servers.

Safest thing to assume is that as long as they don't charge for it, you are getting a free service without any promises about quality of service, stability, etc. As Slack just had an outage, that just proves the point that such promises can be broken regardless of whether you pay or not.

If you want properly free stuff, you'll have to run your own servers with any of the several OSS solutions out there.

So you don’t use open source

Open source is not a service.

You can compare it to public domain work. They are free, as in beer, because their creator is long dead or chose to put them there. He's not gaining anything in return like companies are.

I do, and I'm happy to pay for consulting services or new features. I'm talking about incentives not the validity of business models. This idea is very interesting, but without a business model I'm hesitant to add them as a dependency, that's all.

You’ve boxed this off in some artificial way, IMO.

Open source coders provide software development and support services for free. They’re not providing a physical product.

I feel like you’re stuck on some ephemeral concept around what a service is.

Human beings provide a services for a variety of prices. A business provides a profit generating pipeline.

And we all see how those can vanish over night. Or just decide to kill things coughgooglecough

Seems like a contrived line in the sand, IMO

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