I agree.

Over a 10 year horizon, the difference between 1€/m and 3€/m is a mere 240€.

That's like 2-5 extra work hours over the course of 10 years!

I seriously don't get how someone working in tech would fear bankruptcy over this.

There are much cheaper alternatives to Ente. Filen.io, which is also E2E encrypted, for example costs 200 GB montly for 1.99 Euro. Its difficult to compete with iCloud if your service costs three times as much.

Filen is perhaps cheaper because they are storing lesser replicas. It is not financially feasible to provide 3 replicas at their price points, unless they're running their own storage infrastructure, which doesn't seem to be the case.

Now Ente could of course choose to keep lesser replicas and offer "lite" plans that are more affordable. But we would rather not complicate our pricing structure right now. Understanding buckets of GBs is hard enough, and adding tiers on top would worsen the experience for most.

All of that said, Filen does seem like a really cool project for storing files.