Hey, maintaining and providing support for a server that is de-coupled from underlying external integrations (storage, payment, secrets, email, ...) is what requires bandwidth.

Also, self-hosted consumer products are hard to sustain profitably. Avenues for monetization are low.

Given that our long term target audience is people like my parents, we did not see enough value in investing in a self-hosted variant, and wanted to reduce the number of distractions.

This is not to say that we are against the idea of a self-hosted variant, just that it is not a priority for us right now.

The self-hosted audience is also very small. I think you made the right choice.

For photos I’d agree as most customers are end users. Don’t underestimate this for other products though. Self hosting is a huge feature for selling into large corporations with data security policies.

Why would corporations want to use google photos alternative tho? They're probably are using Gsuite or Office 365 already, both of which have photo storage options. If they're okay with their emails there, I dont think photos is an issue. So yes they made the right choice, by ignore the self hosting crowd, which is a very small crowd.

It looks like they only open sourced the clients, not the backend.

Also the phrase "ente has an open architecture and source code that has been peer reviewed" that can be found on their website follows a dark pattern: hey, look we are open but not really.

Hey, I'm sorry that it came across that way. Thanks for pointing it out, I now see the lack of clarity. I've updated the copy to better reflect the situation.

Great, thanks for the fast reaction!

AKA we want to lock you in to our PAAS

That seems counterintuitive.

As long as the server is closed source, this remains in the 'nice but do not touch' territory.