Hacker News Reader

Comment by edf13 | Hacker News Reader

Hi Ian,

What’s the long term business model then?

Hi edf13 -

We're still exploring different methods of monetization, but leaning towards an Adblock-Plus style model at the moment (but would want to keep any ads we served entirely local / we'd never send any data off device & would want to be as transparent about everything as possible). Personally, I think it keeps our interests best aligned with those of our users & helps keep the focus on preserving user privacy!

So, if I understand correctly, this means that in the long-term you are going to nerf your (future) adblock feature and actually go a similar route the the Brave browser is going with their ad system?

The privacy community did not react positively _at all_ to this. This also has gotten them quite a lot of negative media coverage.

Also, how are you funded short-term? Like, right now?

We are still evaluating the best way to go about this, but yes, we've been looking at the way Brave approaches it as well (though of course, we'd like to do it in such a way that everyone's incentives align / we don't compromise user privacy in any way whatsoever).

Short term, I'm self-funding the company (day job + previous exit of an entirely unrelated company).

Self-funding! This is great, did not expect something like this coming from VC-land SF.

We at https://safing.io/ are also self-funded, but also receive a lot of public funding. Interestingly our visions are very similar, but our technical views seem to differ a lot.

I think monetizing a privacy product without having the user pay is extremely hard. There will need to be an extremely high amount of transparency everywhere.

Thanks! Yeah it's definitely been a challenge, but I think it's worth the effort to try to make sure we're keeping incentives properly aligned and really get things right before we try to scale up!

> I think monetizing a privacy product without having the user pay is extremely hard. There will need to be an extremely high amount of transparency everywhere.

I would agree with this wholeheartedly -- we're still very early stages, but trying to keep things as open as possible in terms of our tech & intentions with everything.

> but also receive a lot of public funding.

Curious what sources you receive public funding from?

> Curious what sources you receive public funding from?

We list everything in detail here: https://safing.io/ownership/#influences

This sounds even more legally questionable, where you are replacing others' ads with your own.

I think this is meant to be more like Brave does it.

Yep, if we do go that way, it'd likely be somewhat similar to Brave. Still very much evaluating options here though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com