Is there a reason your company decided to do this?
gortok 4 hours ago [-]
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.
comprev 5 minutes ago [-]
I once worked for a company where they operated in the red for 95% of the year as they paid for project material costs up front. The CFO was quite open about how finances worked in our niche sector.
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!
jadbox 3 hours ago [-]
> "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?
iamjs 3 hours ago [-]
>> "but practically speaking [they] are broke"
> How do you know this?
They were not claiming a fact, they were posing a hypothetical.
satvikpendem 2 hours ago [-]
They mean even in the hypothetical how would they know, without open books? They're just theorizing, same as with revenue.
gortok 2 hours ago [-]
I’m speaking of things I have personally witnessed; but won’t go into more detail than that, for various reasons.
IndySun 2 hours ago [-]
>...won't go in the more detail...various reasons...
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.
Batman8675309 55 minutes ago [-]
Man I love this kind of "evidence" that can't be dismissed, that is ultimately just a big "just trust me bro".
gortok 4 minutes ago [-]
I’m going to give you just one way that a business could do just what I’m saying.
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.
inigyou 59 minutes ago [-]
Is it really hard to imagine a business with 20MM revenue and 21MM expenses?
holistio 37 minutes ago [-]
18 employees on <$100k is not exactly rich.
dewey 4 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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.
> Businesses don’t operate based on revenue. They operate based on profit.
This does not bode well for the entire AI industry.
gortok 3 hours ago [-]
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.
jatins 32 minutes ago [-]
What an unnecessarily negative and cynical reaction to what is neutral at worst and positive at best
jeswin 44 minutes ago [-]
All you saw on that page was the revenue?
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.
Interesting that the pricing page (and so I'm guessing the other data) hasn't been updated since 2022.
satvikpendem 2 hours ago [-]
/open was popularized by Pieter Levels as well, there are quite a few of these sorts of companies.
pseufaux 4 hours ago [-]
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.
stavros 4 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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!)
Cider9986 34 minutes ago [-]
I'm not a bot :)
stavros 3 hours ago [-]
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.
speak_plainly 4 hours ago [-]
Kinda unrelated, but the art direction on Ente's site is really top-notch.
Shalomboy 4 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
speak_plainly 3 hours ago [-]
If you were being fair, designers typically don't decide the website strategy or write the copy. Ente's site seems heavily optimized for a search-driven funnel – they are targeting people explicitly searching for 'photo storage.' When that's your primary acquisition channel, you can afford to be less pedantic about copy variety. They keep the copy incredibly sparse and let the context do the heavy lifting, there is also no need to repeat descriptions on-site when that context is already handled by the search description and App Store links. When people arrive on the site, they know what they've found.
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.
Cider9986 3 hours ago [-]
> Safe home for your photos
This isn't clear?
Milner08 3 hours ago [-]
Really? It seems pretty clearly written on the home page to me. (This is the first time I have heard of the company).
adityamwagh 3 hours ago [-]
Happy to be one of those people contributing those numbers! :) It's a great privacy friendly service.
Cider9986 3 hours ago [-]
Are there any other self-hostable E2EE cloud products as good as Ente? This company is great. AGPL as well.
timcobb 3 hours ago [-]
What do you like about AGPL in this context? Building a similar product and curious! Thanks
Cider9986 2 hours ago [-]
I don't like copyright at all and I don't like the FSF but it protects the users freedoms which gives the community trust. With AI I think any copyright will be less and less important, though.
koiueo 18 minutes ago [-]
What I don't get about Ente is their E2E promise.
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?
vishnukvmd 12 minutes ago [-]
The key is passed in the URL fragment. URL fragments do not leave your browser.
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 so cool. Congratulations! Have you considered opening operating costs as well?
vishnukvmd 5 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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.
rbinv 5 hours ago [-]
Ente feels a lot like Smugmug did back then.
vishnukvmd 5 hours ago [-]
Thanks, I'm a fan of Smugmug :)
dismalaf 3 hours ago [-]
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.
laomos 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
arcticbison 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 17:34:02 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
This does not bode well for the entire AI industry.
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.
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
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!)
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
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?
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/
https://ente.com/help/self-hosting/
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.
$1M ARR seems low though.