Ente – Opening Our Books

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.

Buffer.com is famously open as well, if you like this kind of stuff.

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

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.

Kinda unrelated, but the art direction on Ente's site is really top-notch.

Is there a reason your company decided to do this?

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 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?

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 feels a lot like Smugmug did back then.

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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