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.
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.
I think until they've got a customer base and a proven model a happy median is to put the code in escrow and agree to give the source to paid licensees should the project be abandoned/more than x months without updates/whatever.
Synology's Moments is ok, but it has issues. Not mobile friendly at all, can only create one shareable link per album, and others can't contribute their pictures to your album. Those are the biggest issues in my experience.
I'm still not satisfied, but photoprism seems to move into the right direction here. Digikam os great of you want everything on a single machine. Shot well has other advantages. None of them have a good solution to immediately and automatically import any photo taken on your phone.
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.
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?
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.
For our (nascent) product went the other way and prioritised self-hosting at the expense of stretching ourselves too thin, as that's always been #1 ask from folks looking for "consumer-first" alternatives.
Time will tell if it was the right way forward, but I just went with "you can't fight gravity" and built it the way folks expect it to be (ex: supabase / posthog / gitlab).
I really hope the self-hosted option becomes a thing, but unfortunately "we are not averse to the idea" means especially little in the tech world these days.
That being said, really really hoping for your success! It finally fills a MUCH needed gap in 2021 consumer image viewing software.
There are many many gaps in it right now. Synology is basically the only self-hosted photo solution that grandma could use. Honestly surprised that more people aren't taking advantage of the opportunity.
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.
>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
What happens if you start by pricing all tiers "honestly" (i.e. reasonably profitable even at 100% utilization)? Have you determined that the market won't bear that pricing? If so, is there any way to meet in the middle?
In general, you may be erring a little too much on the side of asking some customers to grossly overpay for their actual utilization and, in practical terms, 100GB to 1TB is just an extremely wide gap, as evidenced by your parent's comment.
So, it seems that most who tip over into the 100GB - 1TB plan will be there, overpaying, for a long time. And, obviously, most people who make it to 1TB will pass through that range. So, if you do see a higher concentration of users in that range than at 1TB (as intuituon would suggest), then you're essentially "punishing" a plurality of your customers by asking them to subsidize a smaller group's pricing.
Failing other options, it may be better to do the inverse: raise the pricing of 1TB to accomodate a "friendlier" 500GB plan.
I definitely empathise with the difficult in competing with the big cloud providers on price. Your service is inevitably going to end up more expensive. Having said that, I'd be interested to know how you're hosting the content.
When I was looking at setting up a similar service, it seemed like you Backblaze B2+Cloudflare might well be the best combination. B2 will sell you storage at $5/TB, and you can get free bandwidth out to Cloudflare's network. It's against Cloudflare's terms to use free plan for image hosting that isn't just images as part of webpages. However, one of their staff members commented on a thread that they'd likely to be willing to set up a custom plan for a business who wanted to do this. And I'd bet that Cloudflare's bandwidth would be a lot cheaper than B2's.
Pre-signed URLs generated with B2's S3 APIs are incompatible with Cloudflare at the moment. We are working around this by using a Cloudflare Worker to proxy data from B2 to the client. This is currently free if you're on the Bundled plan and Cloudflare's support has promised that when they decide to start charging, they will alert us in advance.
Interestingly, Workers Unbound charges 0.045/GB which is more than B2's 0.01/GB.
A viable long term alternative could be Wasabi that offers free egress in return for a $6/TB plan. But we're waiting to see how things pan out before executing an expensive migration.
B2 documentation suggests that after adding a CNAME (eg. cdn.ente.io) for their bucket endpoint (eg. bucket.s3.eu-central-003.backblazeb2.com), you will be able to replace the latter with the former. This breaks with the native B2 APIs with the following error:
Curious about alternatives. GB to GB, other services will always be cheaper. How do you help frame pricing
What about charging per picture? Likely a non-starter, but you get where I'm going with this. iPod = 1,000 songs in your pocket.
If not you, someone will figure this out. Charging by the GB seems hard. What if instead your levels were:
1,000 photos
10,000 photos
100,000 photos
You might get people who store super high res files, but work that into the pricing.
I had thought about this a year ago when I was pitching the product to my parents who had no idea what a GB was. But I was put off by the possibility of abuse once I extended the framework to videos.
Appreciate your reply! It gets to the core of your value proposition though. Surely you could add in some limitations if needed. If it worked, maybe the biz would grow so fast you don't care about a little abuse.
Do you have any marketers to help you? Will be hard to navigate the messaging alone.
My phone photos are 2.2 MB each. 1,000 GB's is 1M MB's which equates to approximately 450,000 photos. At $18.99/TB/year, 1,000 photos would cost ~$0.42 a year.
Photos can easily be 30 MB each or more, especially from dedicated cameras. If all photos were 30 MB it would cost $5.69 per year for 1,000 photos.
Not making any point, just calculated it for myself and thought to share.
You know it really gets me thinking about packages rather than GB for this service. Maybe there's a "family plan" opportunity here. Do families value anti-surveillance in general, or is it simply lone actors?
Just the idea of archetypes flashed through my mind. An opportunity to sell to difference audiences. What kind of algos do individuals need, pro photographers, families?
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.