Ente – Opening Our Books
ente.com
ente.com
This isn't clear?
When I saw "safe home for your photos" I assumed it was a platform for uploading photos via an app or on the web. "Cross platform" is even a sub-heading. Do you use iCloud or Google Photos?
Sometimes I see this complaint for products here and I am just... confounded. Are people unable to use context clues to infer meaning? I really don't mean to be rude here. It feels like there is some grander disconnect like if someone younger looked at a floppy disk and didn't know that it was a save icon.
>Sometimes I see this complaint for products here and I am just... confounded.
I think you probably don't have as much experience with the depth and breadth of peoples comprehension of online design language as you might think you do.
"Safe home for your photos" - even this is ambiguous. Photos, as in hard copy? Or digital images? Or digital photos?
You might have the grok to understand this is a digital service, but there is a wide variety of users out there who won't get this, at all.
And I think that is limiting the reach of this service. In the rush to be design leaders, the details about what the product is and how it works are not being communicated properly.
I took another look. It's still not clear to me - do I need to use their special app? Can I use a web page? Do I give it access to my iCloud Photos and it does it all for me? What does the app look like? Why can't I use Photos.app, and what differentiates Ente from iCloud Photos - at first (assumptive) glance, it appears redundant.
I am not convinced by the marketing. I stand by my original observation that it appears the designers are not at all interested in the product they are pimping and seem instead to just want to do cool, distracting design language.
Usability fail at the marketing level doesn't help reach critical mass. I predict Ente will fail.
I think the point is that it's an alternative clone of iCloud or Google Photos that's not from Apple or Google. For some people, it's really obvious why you would want that, but if it's not to you, I can see why it might be more confusing why it exists.
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.
Their design team has written a blog post, which may be of interest to you: https://ente.com/blog/ente-design-system / https://archive.vn/ucGnC
The largest text front and center on ente.com
Revenue: https://buffer.com/metrics
Expenses: https://buffer.com/transparent-pricing
Salaries of every employee (which seems like PII to me): https://buffer.com/salaries
And more: https://buffer.com/open
Reminds me of Frappe (ERPNext) letting employees choose their own pay: https://frappe.io/blog/culture/choosing-your-own-pay-how-doe... / https://archive.vn/o7NtE
... which ended being, well ... eventful: https://frappe.io/blog/culture/in-the-aftermath-of-exuberanc... / https://archive.vn/BRaQc
That's pretty decent. DuckDuckGo I think just gives a flat value to everyone.
I have a local instance running on a Raspberry Pi with about 149.000 photos inside.
https://actualbudget.org is fantastic and self-hostable, but or can be installed locally on a desktop. There's no cloud version but it still largely fits your criteria.
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.
There's room for both.
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.
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.”
This does not bode well for the entire AI industry.
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.
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?
> How do you know this?
They were not claiming a fact, they were posing a hypothetical.
Of course, the whole point is that you typically would have no idea of the numbers unless the books are open and include both numbers. Which Ente is not doing.
I wish you had said that in your opening comment. Would've helped me consider where you were coming from.
I'm just making an overall remark, wondering what you're inferring, and more widely still digesting this entire post.
Did you know there are whole businesses that lend money through ‘receivables financing’? Basically if you have outstanding invoices, you can get the money for those invoices now, and you pay (let’s say) 15% in interest to get that money now. https://www.allianz-trade.com/en_US/insights/receivables-fin...
All else being equal, your profitability just went down by 15% taking that receivables loan; but businesses are willing to lend money at varying degrees of interest while the company that took that money still looks like they’re in great shape if you were to look at their revenue, but 2 or 3 of these sorts of advance loans can hurt a company really quickly.
The issue is that it takes a long time, if a business is engaging in shady business practices, for them to be held accountable (if they ever are), and there are lots of ways to keep a business afloat while effectively robbing Peter to pay Paul.
For a potential customer deciding whether to trust a relatively small app (compared to Google and Apple) with their memories, these are useful numbers. 50% increase in paying customers this year. Nearly half a million registered users, with a 40% growth in the last 6 months. 5% of their users are paying customers. Revenue topping a million. That's stuff I want to know if I'm subscribing and uploading all my pics to their servers. I want to know if they'll be around, and my stuff is safe.
> 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...
Oh please. Perhaps work on not jumping to conclusions too quickly.
How do those numbers tell you that, though? Profit would be a better indicator of how likely they are to still be around tomorrow, in my opinion at least.
A client would pay an invoice and the balance would swing from -£20M to £0 and back down to -£15M for the next project within weeks! Revenue was in the £100Ms per annum.
As someone with almost zero business background it was a real eye opener how much we depended on a healthy relationship with the local bank manager. The business model clearly worked as they passed their 30th anniversary during my employment!
You end up leverage for all the goods but the final settlement of payment happens much later, making them hard to survive in without a lot of capital and good relationships.
You can screwed very easily and understanding the model and not scaling faster than your capital allows is a skill in itself.
My friend failed at it while I was working with them.
Well, you have that right. But apparently they IPO based on even less.
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.
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!)
You mean, on a self-hosted Ente (or Immich), a off-device/server-side, capable multimodal LLM, like Gemma4 12b would do?
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 actually does this, and they do a _pretty good job_ considering the limitations of E2EE.
Immich, Google Photos, Apple Photos- these platforms don't have to work around the fact all user data is opaque ciphertext. I imagine you could extend the capabilities of machine learning to a trusted node (similar to what you can do with Ente Desktop, but with more capable models), but they still have to work around any of that metadata being visible to them as well.
This takes somewhat trivial problems and makes them entirely non-trivial to solve. Self hosted platforms that don't provide an E2EE story have significantly less headache to deal with, especially since most people justify it by "it's running on my server so it's okay". And I get that, you can generally work around this issue with disk-level encryption and you're all good. It's just not the same product at all.
And, if stuff has to be hosted by third parties for me, I prefer it to be encrypted.
I’ve never had any issue with facial recognition. Maybe this is a rare issue that’s an easy fix.
Of course I also dump all of the data about once per week on a NAS, just in case :)
I am a happy user of “ente auth” ever since authy killed their desktop app. Bitwarden is too much I just need a 2fa app that is secure enough but not too annoying like remembering a 2nd factor for my 2fa app.
Only today did I remember oh they do photo backups.
Love from KL.
$1M ARR seems low though.
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.
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.
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.
I think if you do want something hosted by someone else without the hassle and time investment of self hosting, you want end to end encryption, your choices especially for something very strong on photo organization features is a pretty small selection.
Something like Proton Drive is pretty weak on photo features, or you could go with iCloud photos with enhanced security mode but then you’re still with big tech in a locked down ecosystem.
wonderful thing opening their books.
but damn consumer software is the numbers are brutal.
the number of customers you need to reach $1M vs B2B is crazy.
When you share albums with someone else, the key is passed in the URL. Nothing prevents Ente from grabbing the key and decrypting all the data at this point.
So it's basically "E2E, trust me bro".
Or am I missing something?
Implementation details here: https://ente.com/blog/building-shareable-links/
Hm... "personal" memories, no mention of "public" memories </s>