I agree with the comments here.
With Ente, to ensure sustainability we simply don’t offer forever free plans.
This was a decision we took early on because when it comes to trusting your photos with a company, you’d be looking at one that can outlive you. So to us durability is the most important attribute, and taking this route has given us slow, but sustainable growth.
That said, there’s a sweet spot to freemium offerings where it could drive enough growth to ensure sustainability (where your paid customers subsidize your free ones). We haven’t found that spot yet.
Also, the business model of enabling self hosting and charging for support only works in the context of B2B software. For consumer apps, open-source and privacy can only serve as ancillary features (or marketing vectors) to an otherwise great product.