Fair enough. I still don’t think that being open about their self-hosted option would hurt them.

You implied that it would hurt business, and that really doesn’t seem to be the case for other projects using a self-hosted/subscription business model.

If you meant something else, then I guess I misunderstood. No harm, no foul.

Has that killed Bitwarden yet? There are many self-hosted projects that also have paid options.

I’d be happy with a paid (one-time fee) license for a self-hosted option with any software. Subscriptions should only be paying for data/storage, and if that’s offloaded to the customer’s local hardware, there’s no need to keep them on a subscription.

Especially for a product that’s privacy-first, that really should include a self-hosted option (paid or otherwise).

I don’t mean to talk negatively at all, and their product looks amazing (especially with the added context you’ve provided).

For me, based on my own experience and the huge amount of storage needed to keep my photos/videos safe, it’s not cost-effective for me personally. If the choice was any of the other paid services or Ente, I think Ente would be the clear winner from the sound of it.

Like with all other online services, it’s cheap until your collection grows. I basically outpaced Google Drive (at the time), and it would have been significantly more expensive to continue with their paid plans. So, I invested in hardware. LOL

But realistically, if you have a smaller photo/video collection, then I think it would be just as easy to spend $5-10 a month and forget about it. I was working with decades worth of images, so I would quickly outgrow any 1, 2, 3TB plans.

I may have tried the demo at some point (along with other Self-hosted solutions for photo backup), but Synology Photos does what I want without any real setup.

For search, I use a paid software called Excire Foto (German origin) that uses local-AI. I point it to my network folder, and it creates its own database away from my originals. Expensive software, but it’s been worth it. Synology photos also has searching by subject, but Excire is far more contextual and easily beats out anything that Google Photos offered.

My Synology NAS is set up as RAID, so there’s redundancy built in.

Then I have daily backups to an external drive (automatic, so there’s no intervention).

In addition to (automatic) daily encrypted cloud backup (which I’m looking for an alternative due to rising costs). Ideally, I’d love to set up a second, smaller NAS somewhere else to offset the cloud backup costs.

Then I have a monthly backup on physical media kept secured outside of my home.

But my NAS handles way more than just photos and video, so this low effort is really covering all kinds of data.

I made the switch to self-hosting in part to reduce subscription costs of various services, and I’m sure that by now my setup has paid for itself.

Thank you. Any reason why they wouldn’t make it more apparent from their homepage? I’m always interested in self-hosted solutions, and even I ducked out of there after seeing only subscription plans being offered.

Is it?? They don’t make that evident anywhere on their website. All I see is a pricing page with no hint that it can be self-hosted.

I appreciate the privacy-first model, but I don’t think I can ever go back to paid subscriptions for my photo and video storage. Not only does it cost a fortune over time, but when the company eventually folds or changes their policy for the worst, it’s a nightmare to get your photos and videos to another platform.

Self-hosting is what I prefer, although, I can appreciate that it’s not an option for everyone.

I think the point is, you just don’t support products from countries led by dictators. I wouldn’t use an OS from North Korea, no matter how free it was. LOL

In my case, the US is worse than North Korea, because they threaten the existence of my country (Canada) on a daily basis.

And for the EU, they have as much reason to distance themselves from Americans than I do.

There are far too many alternatives from other countries to even entertain an American distro. My opinion, anyway.

Fedora Origin: USA

No, thanks. 🙅

It’s like you need high-level programming training to even understand how to contribute to their project. Where’s the “Edit” button, for example?

I’ve contributed dozens of hours to other projects (namely OpenStreetMap), but it’s DEAD SIMPLE to contribute there.

Come to think of it, there have been a number of times where I’ve wondered about what a foss project does/looks like and I think a single screenshot would’ve just been a big help in understanding how it behaves.

Yes!! I’m glad I was able to illustrate my point better.

I think my point was missed. I wasn’t saying that GIMP should copy what Adobe does (I can’t stand Adobe and their “business model” spyware bullshit.

My point was more to show that Adobe showcases the features of the software, so a potential user knows what it does without needing to go through the trouble of downloading it. It may not be what the user wants, and that’s ok, at least they know!

But GIMP is so vague in their description and offers no insight to what the app does or looks like. There’s no need to be mysterious.

Man, that text does the app no favours. “Image editor” could mean that it crops photos. But GIMP does a hell of a lot more. It’s been “the open-source photoshop” for decades, and they’re really selling themselves short. Screenshots would have made it so much easier to see what the software does.

Ok, let’s get off Adobe for a second… here’s a FOSS example: https://www.rawtherapee.com/

Easy to understand exactly what it does, screenshots are excellent. Surely, you can agree that this is better than how GIMP presents itself, right?

Taste aside, you can easily see what features Photoshop has, rather than guessing, right?

I should have used a FOSS example, since Adobe is just bad in general (users saying the page has pop-ups, etc.).

For sure, I don’t mean to blanket all FOSS projects under the same observation. But I’ve seen some projects where the idea is brilliant, and it fills a gap that no other software can, but they have piss-poor instructions (or none at all) and hardly describe what the project is or does. You only learn about them by chance, which is a real shame.

Here’s another example: Navidrome (https://www.navidrome.org/) is an awesome, self-hosted music streaming software.

But their homepage doesn’t have a screenshot, so you have no idea if the UI is just command prompt, ugly, unintuitive, or the best thing ever. Even the “learn more” page has no screenshots unless you really go digging.

Compare that to another FOSS self-hosted music streamer: https://ampache.org/

Simple website, but at least you can see exactly what to expect from the UI. Huge advantage even if they two apps do the exact same thing (both based on the Subsonic backend).

An informed user goes through that much effort. Most users are not informed and will do a quick search, download something that looks remotely what they think they need, and they’re done.

This is why it’s frustrating that some really good open-source software end up being lost in a sea of other stuff that was easier for someone to download, without doing a ton of research.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a website, but a website should be “home base” for a software, company, etc. If not the official website, then the developer has less control over the presentation of their product, which would suck.

App stores are successful for a reason: they offer a quick, accessible means to find 1000s of apps or desktop software. And if an app has a poor description or piss poor screenshots, they are skipped very quickly.

The same applies to the UX and UI of an app or website. A poor experience can cause someone to uninstall it (or exit the page), even if it offers them the features they want/need.