This is one of those vanity blog posts, a “look at us, we’re open” blog posts without actual openness, or rather, limited openness where it helps their image and not openness that could backfire.<p>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.<p>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.<p>There are businesses that operate 20MM a year in revenue, but practically speaking are broke, because of the way the business is being run.<p>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.
> "Showing off revenue and number of accounts is showing off a tiny portion of the picture"<p>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".<p>> "but practically speaking [they] are broke"<p>How do you know this?
>> "but practically speaking [they] are broke"<p>> How do you know this?<p>They were not claiming a fact, they were posing a hypothetical.
They mean even in the hypothetical how would they know, without open books? They're just theorizing, same as with revenue.
I’m speaking of things I have personally witnessed; but won’t go into more detail than that, for various reasons.
>...won't go in the more detail...various reasons...<p>I wish you had said that in your opening comment. Would've helped me consider where you were coming from.<p>I'm just making an overall remark, wondering what you're inferring, and more widely still digesting this entire post.
Man I love this kind of "evidence" that can't be dismissed, that is ultimately just a big "just trust me bro".
Is it really hard to imagine a business with 20MM revenue and 21MM expenses?
18 employees on <$100k is not exactly rich.
What an unnecessarily negative and cynical reaction to what is neutral at worst and positive at best
What's wrong with that? This is a post to show users that other people are paying for it (social proof) and that the project is developing well, similar to other projects sharing how many contributions or first time pull requests they got this month. That doesn't mean that you have to show everyones salary, how much the lunch in the office is costing and include a raw export of their bookkeeping setup.<p>There's room for both.
The accompanying blog post says "The one thing you couldn't see was how well Ente is doing as a business. Now you can."<p>To the parent commenter's point, we don't have enough information to know if that's true.<p>EDIT: the founder is on this thread (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48933905">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48933905</a>) providing more info and explains that adding expenses on would be too burdensome.
> Businesses don’t operate based on revenue. They operate based on profit.<p>This does not bode well for the entire AI industry.
All you saw on that page was the revenue?<p>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.<p>> 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...<p>Oh please. Perhaps work on not jumping to conclusions too quickly.
They poster goes into more details here<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48933905">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48933905</a><p>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.
Buffer.com is famously open as well, if you like this kind of stuff.<p>Revenue: <a href="https://buffer.com/metrics" rel="nofollow">https://buffer.com/metrics</a><p>Expenses: <a href="https://buffer.com/transparent-pricing" rel="nofollow">https://buffer.com/transparent-pricing</a><p>Salaries of every employee (which seems like PII to me): <a href="https://buffer.com/salaries" rel="nofollow">https://buffer.com/salaries</a><p>And more: <a href="https://buffer.com/open" rel="nofollow">https://buffer.com/open</a>
Interesting that the pricing page (and so I'm guessing the other data) hasn't been updated since 2022.
/open was popularized by Pieter Levels as well, there are quite a few of these sorts of companies.
I have been impressed with Ente products and customer service. It's good to see they are growing. That said, revenue information is not entirely helpful in a vacuum. I'd be more keen on seeing profit (even at a lower timeline resolution). What's the average cost for taking on a new customer? What's the retention/turnover? Etc. That said the products are great and I'd recommend them to anyone.
I wish I could say the same. I tried Ente the other day, to see how it compares to Immich, but it was very hit-and-miss. Face recognition for people never worked, no matter what I tried, for example.
I'm in the same boat. I had a so many comments under Immich videos about Ente that it made me wonder if they were just bots.<p>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!)
I'm not a bot :)
Hey Alex! Yes, exactly, I get that they're a fairly different category with different tradeoffs (trustless server), but also I own the server so I don't <i>need</i> it to be trustless. If it worked well, the tradeoff would be smaller, but as it stands it's not worth it for me over Immich.
Kinda unrelated, but the art direction on Ente's site is really top-notch.
Happy to be one of those people contributing those numbers! :) It's a great privacy friendly service.
Are there any other self-hostable E2EE cloud products as good as Ente? This company is great. AGPL as well.
What a refreshingly unique website!
I was wringing my hands trying to decide between Ente and Immich for a while as I'm trying to de-Google. I went with Immich in the end, but Ente seems like a great alternative for anyone that doesn't want to self-host.
This is great - would love to see more data tho! I guess they are shy to post EBITDA, infra costs?
This is so cool. Congratulations! Have you considered opening operating costs as well?
ente.com/open is fully automated.<p>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.<p>Currently we've runway for a few years, and a margin of ~70% – entirety of which is reinvested into building Ente.
If your margins are about 70%, do you have any plans to reduce your prices? Compared to other photo storage platforms, your pricing seems a lot higher. End to end encryption seems to be the only USP when a person looks at your hosted offering.
70% is our gross margin. We have expenses outside of infrastructure (people, ops, marketing, ...).<p>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.
This is cool, I was looking into Ente to supplement Google Photos (I got 6k of my kid's photos, my Google account is associated with too many things and I worry about losing access).<p>$1M ARR seems low though.
Ente feels a lot like Smugmug did back then.
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