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.