| ▲ | Ente – Opening Our Books(ente.com) |
| 101 points by Sherex 4 hours ago | 31 comments |
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| ▲ | gortok 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. 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. |
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| ▲ | jadbox 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > "Showing off revenue and number of accounts is showing off a tiny portion of the picture" 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? | |
| ▲ | dewey an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. There's room for both. | | |
| ▲ | chadash 32 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The accompanying blog post says "The one thing you couldn't see was how well Ente is doing as a business. Now you can." 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. |
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| ▲ | turbocon 24 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They poster goes into more details here 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. | |
| ▲ | monooso 36 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Businesses don’t operate based on revenue. They operate based on profit. This does not bode well for the entire AI industry. | | |
| ▲ | gortok 27 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Public IPO as Ponzi scheme/shell game is a time-honored tradition. You can operate at a loss so long as you can get folks to bet they’ll get a return. The more people you can convince, the better you can do for yourself without being left holding the bag. |
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| ▲ | pseufaux an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | stavros an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | alexktz 28 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. 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!) | | |
| ▲ | stavros 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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 need 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. |
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| ▲ | speak_plainly an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Kinda unrelated, but the art direction on Ente's site is really top-notch. |
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| ▲ | Shalomboy an hour ago | parent [-] | | I came to the comments to say the same thing! I would love to take a seminar or a class from the folks in their design department. | | |
| ▲ | MomsAVoxell an hour ago | parent [-] | | I found it over blown. It took me far too long looking past the ducks to find out what Ente actually does. The design team don’t seem to be interested in the product. | | |
| ▲ | Cider9986 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > Safe home for your photos This isn't clear? | |
| ▲ | Milner08 25 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Really? It seems pretty clearly written on the home page to me. (This is the first time I have heard of the company). |
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| ▲ | dismalaf a minute ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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). $1M ARR seems low though. |
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| ▲ | caseyf7 4 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What a refreshingly unique website! |
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| ▲ | Cider9986 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Are there any other self-hostable E2EE cloud products as good as Ente? This company is great. AGPL as well. |
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| ▲ | timcobb 13 minutes ago | parent [-] | | What do you like about AGPL in this context? Building a similar product and curious! Thanks |
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| ▲ | adityamwagh 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Happy to be one of those people contributing those numbers! :) It's a great privacy friendly service. |
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| ▲ | alimbada an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | dabeeeenster 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is great - would love to see more data tho! I guess they are shy to post EBITDA, infra costs? |
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| ▲ | f3408fh 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is so cool. Congratulations! Have you considered opening operating costs as well? |
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| ▲ | vishnukvmd 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | ente.com/open is fully automated. 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. | | |
| ▲ | AnonHP an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | vishnukvmd an hour ago | parent [-] | | 70% is our gross margin. We have expenses outside of infrastructure (people, ops, marketing, ...). 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. |
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| ▲ | rbinv 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Ente feels a lot like Smugmug did back then. |
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