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.

> "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?

>> "but practically speaking [they] are broke"

> How do you know this?

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.

Man I love this kind of "evidence" that can't be dismissed, that is ultimately just a big "just trust me bro".

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.

Does this really need any evidence? There's lots of businesses that are in this situation, ambling along for years until they run out of runway. Not saying anything about the original blog. There are even actual fraud cases you can look up.

Yeah I don't understand why people jumped on this. Thread-OP was saying pretty obvious if not trivial things. Without knowing how much they spend knowing how much they earn is a useless data point.

>...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.

Is it really hard to imagine a business with 20MM revenue and 21MM expenses?

18 employees on <$100k is not exactly rich.

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!

This is very common in a lot of industries especially physical goods and medicine.

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.

I worked for similar company. And yes, it basically depended on the relationship with the local bank managers and suppliers. Unfortunately, it wasn't so successful.

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.

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.

What an unnecessarily negative and cynical reaction to what is neutral at worst and positive at best

> Businesses don’t operate based on revenue. They operate based on profit.

This does not bode well for the entire AI industry.

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.

>Businesses don’t operate based on revenue

Well, you have that right. But apparently they IPO based on even less.

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.

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.

> Businesses don’t operate based on revenue. They operate based on profit.

The most difficult part of a consumer SaaS or really selling anything on the internet is acquiring customers.

Zero revenue = zero profit automatically with no ability to ever make a profit.

If a startup has paying customers there's at least the chance to become profitable.

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

Those are killer salaries for the ones not in the US. Imagine earning $160k USD in Morocco, Nigeria or Panama. 99.9th percentile.

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.

> Salaries of every employee: https://buffer.com/salaries

Reminds me of Frappe (ERPNext) letting employees choose their own pay: https://frappe.io/blog/culture/choosing-your-own-pay-how-doe... / https://archive.vn/o7NtE

... which ended being, well ... eventful: https://frappe.io/blog/culture/in-the-aftermath-of-exuberanc... / https://archive.vn/BRaQc

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.

Who knows what the problem could be - if you want to invest time into this, you could try collecting some debug logs to see if it indicates anything. For me and my family it works pretty well (~300G of data across 10s of thousands of photos / videos). Face recognition / AI search works reasonably well. It's not perfect, but I'm happy to keep our photos under our control rather with some big tech company which could decide on a whim to erase all of my data (or even worse, report me to the police and then erase all of my data).

Of course I also dump all of the data about once per week on a NAS, just in case :)

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!)

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 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.

Comparing self-hosted immich and a truly E2EE hosted platform like Ente is really odd. There are massively different trade-offs and target customers between these.

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.

I agree it's not. It's just that, for someone who doesn't need the trustless architecture, it doesn't make sense to go with Ente right now, because it doesn't work as well. I could overlook the missing features if the ones that are there worked, but face recognition just got stuck for me and never finished.

> I don't need it to be trustless. If it worked well, the tradeoff would be smaller...

You mean, on a self-hosted Ente (or Immich), a off-device/server-side, capable multimodal LLM, like Gemma4 12b would do?

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

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.

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.

I sure hope you don't market apps but I suspect you do.

> Safe home for your photos

This isn't clear?

Nope. Is it a service, an app? Do I have to use their app? What's it look like? Can I use the photos app, or .. what is it?

Really? It seems pretty clearly written on the home page to me. (This is the first time I have heard of the company).

Ente has a CFP submitted for a India FOSS (Sep 2026) talk that will also be recorded and livestreamed (if selected): https://fossunited.org/c/indiafoss/2026/cfp/2tsmo50knt

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

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.

Well, not E2EE, but I like Photoprism very much for the self-hosted photosharing use-case. In fact, I tried Ente a while ago and am always impressed by their communication skills, but from a product side, I prefer Photoprism.

I have a local instance running on a Raspberry Pi with about 149.000 photos inside.

not e2ee but you can use immich behind pangolin/reverse proxy

What do you like about AGPL in this context? Building a similar product and curious! Thanks

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.

Is there a reason your company decided to do this?

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.

You can self-host Ente.

https://ente.com/help/self-hosting/

What a refreshingly unique website!

This is great - would love to see more data tho! I guess they are shy to post EBITDA, infra costs?

Hi, answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48933905

This is so cool. Congratulations! Have you considered opening operating costs as well?

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.

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, ...).

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.

70% is not unreasonable gross margin. What makes you think that’s a reason to ask that they lower prices? That 70% has to cover a lot of expenses.

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?

The key is passed in the URL fragment. URL fragments do not leave your browser.

Implementation details here: https://ente.com/blog/building-shareable-links/

Ente feels a lot like Smugmug did back then.

Thanks, I'm a fan of Smugmug :)

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.