The cost of service is a little higher than it seems at the beginning because we do full isolation, you get a full separate server VM, your own database, nothing is shared. It’s not like Slack which is effectively a time share on a global singleton instance. That means we can give you the keys to the kingdom, E2E encryption with no key held on our end (i.e. no escrow, you hold the only copy) or we can do on premises in a manner that can be pretty much up to you. We even offer a service to come in and maintain your own air-gapped physical box if you don’t want to do the sysadmin work for the on-prem.
We can even accommodate custom requests like running the instance on our servers, but pointing the database to your on-premises database, so you remain in full control of the data while you can still avoid the maintenance cost for running an on-prem service.
Also, if you’re a team large enough for it to cost $300, we do enterprise pricing, and can actually tailor it to you, so you might actually end up paying less depending on what that ends up being.
For the features, you’re right, and we actually have lots of stuff in the docket, I just didn’t feel great about having upcoming features on the landing page, so that’s why it might have looked this way.
I would love to hear if you have any feature requests, especially if you think it’s missing something. We want this to be as useful as humanly possible, and you’re pretty much our target audience. We’re designing for ourselves here, no holds barred.
Thanks for the response. I know I shouldn’t just an org based on its design but I think that sometimes thoughtfulness in design equates to responsiveness with comments like these.
The isolation might be really helpful to me and is there a way to learn more about it? I work in an organization that is weird as the cost isn’t really the issue, but the effort to test and validate security. So it’s a weird cycle that’s hard to work with vendors because I might evaluate for a long time before purchasing, or never purchase at all.
I rarely contact for enterprise pricing for new tools because I don’t know if it’s an enterprise option or if I want it for enterprise. And I don’t have time to enter the enterprise sales cycle unless I’m certain. This is probably frustrating for growing companies as I’m just another annoying customer and it’s hard to differentiate buyers from non-buyers. And 90% of the time, I’m not buying. Maybe have some case studies for enterprise licenses showing team combinations as I didn’t even consider that a 30 person team would be enterprise worthy. For me “contact us for enterprise” means a lifetime of dodging bizdev people. My throwaway email is now even too crowded :)
Thanks for the oss link, this helps quite a bit and may be good enough for me to eval and follow up. There’s a whole cloud reg called FedRAMP that I rarely find small companies go through the documentation effort even if the design supports it. And the design constraints are real.
All good questions again, and the answer to why of all questions here is because we launched less than a week ago. :) Well, to qualify this, the Pro got launched a week ago, but the open source version has been online for more than a year and it’s been tested up to a few thousand users in the global realm, so the actual product is solid - just the enterprise side is new.
No documentation for the enterprise features yet, and I fully understand, I absolutely hate to do the whole ‘call us for enterprise’ dance (never called that number in my life, never will, hate the whole price opacity thing) because writing about these features is something I have to do myself. The reason why we have that is explicitly because we don’t have docs for those yet. And since it relates to a small percent of users, I have documentation that is asked by more people that's next on my queue, so trying to cover starting from the more common things.
However, I would love to answer all questions myself over email, or even come to your office and have a chat (no obligation! we want feedback) if you’re in San Francisco.
If you end up picking enterprise deployment and choose us to implement it, I’d be the one to come set it up, as the founder myself.
And yes - the community version is a good way to demo it, give it a shot. It does have a decent bit of content in it, so you can definitely see how it would work. One thing though, the community one is a peer to peer network, so data propagation is over P2P (I also wrote the P2P stack) this non-instant. For the Pro, we actually have proper SaaS infra on GCP, so it's much more work-grade.
The cost of service is a little higher than it seems at the beginning because we do full isolation, you get a full separate server VM, your own database, nothing is shared. It’s not like Slack which is effectively a time share on a global singleton instance. That means we can give you the keys to the kingdom, E2E encryption with no key held on our end (i.e. no escrow, you hold the only copy) or we can do on premises in a manner that can be pretty much up to you. We even offer a service to come in and maintain your own air-gapped physical box if you don’t want to do the sysadmin work for the on-prem.
We can even accommodate custom requests like running the instance on our servers, but pointing the database to your on-premises database, so you remain in full control of the data while you can still avoid the maintenance cost for running an on-prem service.
Also, if you’re a team large enough for it to cost $300, we do enterprise pricing, and can actually tailor it to you, so you might actually end up paying less depending on what that ends up being.
For the features, you’re right, and we actually have lots of stuff in the docket, I just didn’t feel great about having upcoming features on the landing page, so that’s why it might have looked this way.
Aether is actually open source, this specific one is Aether Pro. I’m the maintainer of Aether and the founder of the Pro one. I even wrote about how I ended up there recently: https://blog.getaether.net/post/187618079292/a-new-funding-m...
I would love to hear if you have any feature requests, especially if you think it’s missing something. We want this to be as useful as humanly possible, and you’re pretty much our target audience. We’re designing for ourselves here, no holds barred.