$1M ARR seems low though.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
Reminds me of Frappe (ERPNext) which lets employees choose their own raise: https://frappe.io/blog/culture/choosing-your-own-pay-how-doe...
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?
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!
This does not bode well for the entire AI industry.
There's room for both.
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.
Implementation details here: https://ente.com/blog/building-shareable-links/
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.
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.
> How do you know this?
They were not claiming a fact, they were posing a hypothetical.
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 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!)
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.
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.
This isn't clear?
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.
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.
You mean, on a self-hosted Ente (or Immich), a server-side, capable multimodal LLM, like Gemma4 12b would do?
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.