Comment by DenisM

5 years ago

I concur. However storage is how they plan to make money, so there will need to be a different monetization strategy for BYO storage. As yet I can't imagine any.

EDIT:

I think have an idea! Add the S3/OneDrive/Etc support but comment it out. To make use of it one would have to download the source, XCode, compile it, and deploy it. This puts a cap on the number of people who can do that, so you won't end up with everyone getting a free copy. Those people who are able to do it are likely to be asked for advice by their less techy friend, so this is basically free software to key influencers.... Ok, so this does not sound as exciting as it did before I started typing, but maybe this will lead to something...

6 comments

DenisM

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fy20  5 years ago

The problem with that is that some kind fellow on GitHub will clone the project, uncomment the code to enable the premium features for free, and change its name. If it's released under a FOSS license, the original authors have little recourse.

This is what happened with Emby (a media server like Plex). The backend was open source and there was a license to activate premium features. Somebody cloned it, and then released the premium features to everyone for free.

vishnumohandas  5 years ago

So it's a little more complicated than that.

Our API server runs the following

- authentication

- replication

- differential sync

- and a few more errands that are necessary for the apps to function

The solution to this would be to offer a self-hosted variant where you can plug in your S3 credentials. But like I mentioned else where in this thread, maintaining such a project comes with an overhead we cannot afford right now. Hopefully sometime in the future we will be able to afford the necessary engineering bandwidth.

  • barbazoo  5 years ago

    I like how Joplin does it for notes. You authorize them as an application in Dropbox or give them credentials to a S3 bucket. Don't get me wrong. I want to pay for your service. I just have to be able to access and decrypt my files if you had to shut down your service all of a sudden.

    • vishnumohandas  5 years ago

      Our pricing model is such that the product can self sustain itself. Also, we have a desktop app[1] that syncs your uploaded data to a local drive, so you don't have to worry about a lock-in.

      But even if we do have to sunset the service due to unforeseeable reasons, our cold storage is relatively inexpensive and we will give our customers ample time to migrate out.

      Also, in such a scenario we would want to publish our entire system in an easily deployable way so that all our efforts would not be in vain.

      [1]: https://github.com/ente-io/bhari-frame/releases/latest

      1 reply →

  • toredash  5 years ago

    I would pay for a self hosted solution, or for a solution where I can plug into a backend you support.

    I would also pay upfront, e.g. kickstarter