Comment by imagine99
5 years ago
I fully agree. It's a hard sell getting people to switch from an evil but known cloud provider to an unknown cloud provider that claims to not be evil.
What we do not need is more cloud offerings that can change, vanish or lock us out at the blink of an algorithm's eye.
What we need, rather, are reliable and easy-to-use solutions that allow us to retain full control of our data (i.e. self-hosted and offline) while having feature parity with the big cloud-only solutions.
I for one am convinced that there is plenty of money to be made that way. Perhaps not as much on autopilot as with the quasi-scam that is cloud computing, but people willingly paid hundreds or thousands for software before clouds and subscriptions. People will do so again, if you bring a convincing, unique or competitive product to market.
That being said, I like, appreciate and support this project for its impetus, even though I think its distribution strategy is misguided and fad-driven (re-selling cloud space instead of selling software). It's not too late to change that...
Hey, so the project had initially started off as a self-hostable software (with an option to buy a pre-configured device). We realized soon that it's hard to monetize such a product in the consumer space to the point where it can become self-sustaining.
We don't have a problem with offering a self-hosted variant. But given our limited engineering bandwidth we had to take a call on who our target market should be, and we felt that it was more important to make privacy accessible to people like my mom and dad. Hence this direction.
> We realized soon that it's hard to monetize such [self-hosted product]
Spot on. We iterated on a similar product in this space: "privacy preserving", "self-hosted", "open source" etc. But focused on local AI indexing & search of personal videos and photos [0], rather than backups.
We ultimately shelved VideoNinja because we weren't able to find a sustainable business angle:
* Non-technical people simply don't care (happy locked into Apple / Google).
* Technical people understood the proposition, but are super stingy. Case in point, see the responses in this very thread: "$10 per year max; I can buy a HDD for less!". That's one (cheap) restaurant meal per year.
So I fully understand your decision to go "cloud". Although that immediately takes your product off the table for me personally. I want nothing of mine (of value) in the cloud.
I feel there must be a way to square that circle, the market exists.
[0] https://video-ninja.com/
Just put a price on it, ffs! Make it extensible with plugins. To gain 100% trust make it open source. I am happy to pay good money of a local, non-leaking AI based tagging software for video and photos.
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While it unfortunately didn't work in the consumer market, there's a space for video recognition in the business space:
- Scene finding for directors/news channels. AP and other sources have a lot of material but you pretty much literally have to watch the entire video in order to find a good scene.
- Scene finding for the XXX crowd. Very underserved market.
- Scene finding for police/lawyers. While it may seem like the opposite of 'privacy preserving', defense attorneys are literally just swamped with video evidence in an attempt to make them give up. Similarly if you're suing a big company for something as simple as an on the job injury or harassment, and need to prove there's a pattern of harm... they'll give you everything and let you do the work of finding out that there was a pattern of bad behavior.
It's the kind of thing that'd be useful as an open source solution... or failing that having a company which is 100% neutral in operation is also good.
I'm currently using Microsoft for something like this because they're absolution massive and apart from their OpenAI division, they only care that what you process is legal.
> I want nothing of mine (of value) in the cloud.
What's the issue with the cloud if you encrypt client-side? It's off-site backup. Isn't it too risky to have your life's work on a few drives in the same location?
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I’d pay for this if it could run locally. Not sure what it would take to be sustainable but solving this problem is worth at least $20/month to me.
I think too many technical people have too much of a distrust of the cloud. I, for one, am happy to offload as much as possible to the cloud (except latency-sensitive things like games) and not carry around drives and drives at home.
I get the decision but I think it misses part of the problem: how do you convince people like your mum and dad to start paying for backups and how do you convince them to pay extra for privacy?
I suspect the way it usually happens is that somebody your parents trust (like you) tells them to sign up for a privacy-preserving backup service.
But who's going to tell them to do that? Do you have the money to pay for advertising?
Normally, I'd suspect it's the tech-savvy younger folks who'd tell them to buy something like this but with your pricing and lack of self-hosted options, I suspect you've alienated a large portion of the tech-savvy audience you need to advocate for your product.
If their service works well and is convenient to use, I’ll be recommending it by word of mouth. In the case of my parents, if I can finally consolidate and de-duplicate the photos from our 3+ Apple Photos collections by pointing the service at “library” folders from a few computers and devices, I’ll be a big fan.
> how do you convince them to pay extra for privacy?
We are hopeful that we will be able to reduce the pricing as we scale up and hit a critical mass.
> who's going to tell them to do that?
We plan to implement a referral program, similar to what Dropbox did, to incentivize existing customers to spread the word.
That said, you do bring up interesting points. To repeat, we aren't averse to the idea of maintaining a self-hosted variant. Just that due to our limited bandwidth we had to choose one direction over another. Having advocates is important and I suppose with time we will have clarity on how to best do this without stretching ourselves too thin.
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I think that's a bit apocalyptic. Plenty of time to observe and adjust.
Can I suggest adding pricing tier(s) between 100GB and 1000GB? I have between 100gb and 200gb of photos, and £14.99/month seems like a lot considering I only pay £2.49/month for google storage. I'd definitely consider paying a premium for this service, but not 6x.
Drawing a direct parallel with Google will make this difficult, since they own their storage and network infrastructure and have ways to monetize your data. But here's an explanation on why there are large gaps between plans:
- Our 1TB plan costs only 3x the 100GB plan. This model works under the assumption that the average utilization of a 1TB plan (across all customers) will be ~30%.
- If we were to bring in an intermediary plan (say 500GB), we would have to increase the pricing of the 1TB plan (since at least 50% will now be utilized), and also set the price of the 500GB plan to at least 2x of the 100GB plan. Both plans now appear unattractive.
- Since Apple and Google don't support per GB billing yet (which IMO would have been the fairest way to go), we had to pick buckets, and the current ones seemed like the fairest possible.
I hope this makes sense.
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What about Google photos is evil? I don't get it.
Okay it's easy to downvote, but I'll elaborate instead. First of all Google is trainihg AI models on your data and also able to create shadow profiles for people including those who decide against using Google services.
They also used dark pattern on Android for years by enabling cloud sync by default for everything. So a lot of people got all their photos uploaded while they had no idea about feature.
So it's not any different from Facebook that constantly tried to collect as much data on you as possible. Do you know what is evil about facebook?
I don't really get what's evil about AI models and cloud sync.
And I don't think anything is wrong about Facebook's business model. I think most people are uninformed about it and believe that they sell personal data, but if you understand the way they make money, it's very difficult to say that there is any particular issue with it.
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The other day I sent out a link made with Google Photos' "create link" function. That's not a share to another user, just a link that anyone can open, no Google account required. But one person showed me that hitting that link on her phone, Google wanted to authenticate her before showing the picture.
That is utterly unacceptable.
Genuinely curious - could you elaborate on why that is so unacceptable? What does requiring authentication imply, or lead to in the future?
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This sounds like mild inconvenience.
What's evil about that?
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