Business wise, I'm not sure I'd be willing to pay for just the automation... in reality you don't use it very often. Could be interesting to try (re)selling tightly knit VPSs, more advanced automation features or support.
I think this solution still captures the self hosted ideology while also providing some cool value. I see people reinventing the wheel all the time while trying to automate self hosted processes... but then again maybe that's why we do it, we like the adventure!
Like, how do you persuade the audience of enthusiasts (think: Unifi buyers) to pay for a subscription to managed software they run on their own computers, raspis, whatever? I would probably spend $10/mo on something like that, but much above that and you'd be fighting against the armchair commentary of users who won't appreciate the effort that goes into stability and will basically have a "no wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame" attitude.
On the software side, integrate tightly with your own subscription services (offsite backups, VPS, etc) to upsell to those who want that, and win over the enthusiast crowd by making it possible to host your own alternatives to those services with a little technical know-how.
Open source most components to appeal to enthusiasts, but keep the secret sauce that makes everything seamless and easy to use "source available" so you don't unintentionally turn your core business into a commodity.
Seems viable to me.
I and probably many others would be OK with paying for the upsell part, if it's an optional convenience, but nothing I saw on your site indicates it is, or that "own your data" is in any meaningful way true. How do I own my data if any use of it requires me running stuff on your proprietary box, subscribing to your proprietary service?
Data from Helm is accessible using IMAP, SMTP, CardDAV, CalDAV, WebDAV on the local network (without requiring our service). You own the device, you own the data. There is a standards-based way of accessing that data just as there is with the hard drive from Best Buy.
I can plug the Best Buy harddrive into almost any computer/SAN I want to and utilize for the purpose I bought for without any lock in. Using the hard drive for my data requires very little trust in Best Buy's good intentions at the time of purchase and zero trust in the continued existence, technical competence or good intentions beyond that -- it is very unlikely that best buy will find a way to snoop on my data even if they wanted to. Everything will continue to work fully as intended until mechanical failure sets in. Feels like ownership to me.
In your case I rent some box from you which will lose almost all its intended function the moment your company goes bust or I stop paying you an annual fee. Furthermore it seems I am completely at the mercy of your original and continued good intentions as in addition to using your lock-in for a big price hike later you presumably can also snoop on my data. As far as I can tell there is no really substantial trust differentiator to protonmail. I have to trust them when they claim they won't read my email and are competent enough to keep things secure and I have to trust you (and continue to trust you as long as I want to use the device) that you will encrypt my data and not exfiltrate any of it (or the private key), and furthermore that you run your servers securely enough that no third party will. But what is to stop it? The box is running closed source software that you can remotely update anytime you feel like it, right? I have physical access, but since I don't control the software, what use is that?
Maybe I didn't understand something right, but so far this does not feel like ownership to me.
It sounds more like the worst of all worlds: the lock-in and lack of ownership of a proprietary cloud-based subscription service with the added hassle, inconvenience, downtime and costs of babysitting (and supplying electricity to) a cloud server for you, the provider.
> Data from Helm is accessible using IMAP, SMTP, CardDAV, CalDAV, WebDAV on the local network (without requiring our service).
In what ways is that better than running an IMAP client on my laptop and using it to send data via protonmail, using my own domain, and keeping offline copies of everything (with a periodic upload to backblaze or some other e2e encrypted backup solution)? That seems to offer about the same control over my data, but is cheaper, easier, more convenient, has higher redundancy/uptime and if anything less lock-in. It also doesn't require an additional device that has no use beyond adding an additional failure point and cost center that's my responsibility.
> There is a standards-based way of accessing that data just as there is with the hard drive from Best Buy.
Accessing the data is not enough because what you are selling me is not an overpriced and unergonomic hard drive. You are selling me the ability to send, receive and store email (and likely more).
Don't get me wrong, I kind of like the idea of buying a physical box and a subscription service to self host stuff in a way that gives me better control over my data for an acceptable amount of hassle. But that really requires some amount of openness/auditability and interoperability that currently appears to be absent.
No - we do not rent hardware. When people buy the server from us, they own it. Full stop. There are ongoing costs to make email at home work: a static IP address with good reputation, a security gateway, traffic, etc. If people don't want to pay us for those costs, they will pay them to an ISP and/or an infrastructure provider like AWS. The ease of setup and management comes from the integration of hardware, software and service.
> I am completely at the mercy of your original and continued good intentions as in addition to using your lock-in for a big price hike later you presumably can also snoop on my data.
This is true of any paid service you use right? They can increase your costs at any time. I'm not sure why you think there's something uniquely bad about us for this reason. We have pretty clear values around wanting to know as little about our customers as possible and designing our products end to end around that. We have worked pretty hard at reducing costs, bringing the server price down 60% while doubling its specifications. Our goal is to make this as cost effective and accessible as possible for everyone. We are not interested in locking in customers - it's easy for anyone to take their data off Helm and go to a server of their own making or another service of their choosing. That's not hypothetical - like any company, we have churned customers and supported them in their migration off our product. It's easy to sling these hypotheticals you are concocting but they are not borne out of any reality.
> As far as I can tell there is no really substantial trust differentiator to protonmail.
There is actually a substantial difference. Protonmail holds your data on their servers and therefore can turn it over without a warrant. Well it's encrypted, right? So what could any entity do with that data? Well, Protonmail may be compelled to modify their service to intercept the password on login to decrypt your inbox and turn it over to a government authority (if you don't think that can happen, see what the German government did to Tutanota).
We aren't in a position to do that. Even if the US government came with a court order for your encrypted backups from us, we don't have access to the keys to decrypt them. If we were asked to make firmware changes, we would be retracing the steps of the FBI/Apple San Bernardino case and would enlist the help of the EFF, ACLU and others to fight. I personally believe the case law is pretty clear that they wouldn't win, which is partly why the FBI relented earlier.
> that you can remotely update anytime you feel like it
You make this sound like a terrible thing but really it's not. It allows us to keep our products patched and secured over time.
> In what ways is that better than running an IMAP client on my laptop and using it to send data via protonmail, using my own domain, and keeping offline copies of everything (with a periodic upload to backblaze or some other e2e encrypted backup solution)?
I didn't say people couldn't roll their own solutions. Sure they can - it's just more work, hassle and fragile. And I already covered the tradeoffs of keeping that data in the cloud. Protonmail has access to all your email in the clear (inbound and outbound). We do not and anyone running a server at home would have similar privacy. That's a clear difference.
> Accessing the data is not enough because what you are selling me is not an overpriced and unergonomic hard drive. You are selling me the ability to send, receive and store email (and likely more).
Actually it is because we were talking about data ownership. Your specific dig was about how "own your data" was in any way true ("or that "own your data" is in any meaningful way true" in your parent post).
At that point, I might as well just go with a paid ProtonMail or similar solution.
My expectations for self hosted isn't to have annual or monthly fees.
If you want to self-host email, you need a trustworthy static IP address with reverse DNS. It's considerably more expensive to get this from an ISP. Our annual fee also includes storage for offsite backups. You don't get the same privacy assurances using Protonmail as you do with self-hosting either. For example, Protonmail is privy to the content of all outbound email messages in the clear unless you are communicating with the recipient using E2EE.
From a cost perspective, Helm V2 starts at $199 for 256GB of storage. First year costs, including subscription work out to $298. With Protonmail, their entry level plan with added storage at the same price buys you an inbox with about 28GB, a small fraction of what you would get with Helm storage-wise, not to mention we don't limit users, email addresses, domains, etc.
it’s mostly tough because of the high upfront capital costs (manufacturing, r&d, and marketing). people still talk fondly about discontinued apple routers and what nest could have been as an independent venture, for example.
This seems a lot easier to me than on-prem cloud services, either in BYOH form ("but it's just software") or as a packaged appliance ("another hub to install, really?").
I would say that the closest thing to this right now for paid is coming from the storage side— NAS providers like Synology using hardware sales to support a limited ecosystem of "one click" deployable apps. And for free, it's ecosystems like HomeAssistant, which a lot of people just deploy as a fire-and-forget RPi image, but as expected with a free ecosystem, as soon as you get off the ultra-common use cases, you're reading source code to figure out how it works, and wading through a tangle of unmaintained "community" plugins that only do half of what you want.
home audio/theater from prior to the internet revolution might be a good analogy: a bunch of separate boxes that each provide tailored functionality but all work together seemlessly without a lot of technical knowledge. that, but for all sorts of computing devices.
I also think it's still a little too nerd-focused for the average consumer. I'd say I know far more about security, networking and hardware than the average consumer but, compared to the HN crowd, I know next to nothing. I struggle to use a lot of the current solutions because they get bogged down in doing cool technical stuff that is so far outside the scope of the average potential user's wants/needs or the DIY solution will be "easy"... for someone with an extensive CS background and years of experience.
for instance, plug in a smart device and have confidence that it's not doing surreptitious things behind your back, because it's automatically segregated into its own vlan and given only enough network access to be controlled by you without needing to know much about the underlying technologies involved.
"automatically segregated into its own vlan"
Aren't these goals fundamentally at odds? I would imagine that Joe consumer (if they care at all about any of this) would be rather more inclined to entrust the role of orchestrating/segregating their home network devices to an entity like Google than to some random startup.
When you lose trust you end up with your crazy uncle leaving Fox News for Alex Jones and YouTube. You have people becoming QAnon followers.
I say this not to make a political point, but that the problem is fundamentally hopeless and I see no way out. You end up landing on one side of the fence or the other. You either just don't think about it and continue to use Google and Facebook and remain ignorant of the problem, or you spiral down the never-ending hole of despair.
We have seen articles recently that tell us not even Signal can be fully trusted. Whether or not it's true is beside the point. The point is, not even the HN crowd is safe from the cliff of paranoia. The seed of doubt has been planted.
Is someone going to trust a small tech startup in 2021? No, not like they would have in 1997. The market for trust has effectively been sealed off today. Because, paradoxically, the Googles and Facebooks ruined it all. They stripped us (all of us, not just HN) of our innocence and naivety. We know not to trust Google, but they are also a known known. A small tech company is a total unknown. We're familiar with how Google is going to bend us over. So if someone is going to do us dirty, it may as well be a known entity. Or... you go and build a cabin in the woods and start writing manifestos.
The most prominent of which is "What happens when they drop support for my use case/lock me out of my account?"
Unfortunately, the cost of running your own one-off solution is rather high. And doubly unfortunately, while I would pay money for a box that I could plug into my computer that provided all of these services, I wouldn't pay enough money to justify someone building it, and selling it to me.
most people, whether they rationalize it or not, are cognizant that we live in the grey gradient of trust for various companies and brands. the vector field is all sorts of wacky and inscrutible, but maybe we can point a few of those vectors in the right direction and some folks will happily slide down it to better (but perhaps not perfect) safety and privacy.