np - just wanted to clear up the confusion if folks might think Element might be part-owned by nation states, which it isn’t.
So we expect revenue from SaaS, where plain TCO says it’s cheaper to get us to host your data than pay in-house people to sysadmin it for you. It’s still your DNS and your keys, and we provide db snapshots if you want, so it really is just outsourced hosting. There is definitely a market for this, as well as separately providing support for massive on premise deployments.
P2P then drives both by network effects. It effectively becomes the default free-for-all platform - but anyone who actually wants a serious home for their data (e.g. any business) will want to find a server, whether that’s selfhost or SaaS.
Ok, cool. Follow-up questions: I honestly believed that your SaaS offering was just a middle-market play and that you expected to be filled by a cottage industry of sorts. Don't you have any concerns about other business undercutting you? In a way what I am doing with communick competes already with your hosting (or I can dream about it) and I won't have the overhead of funding development. What if AWS/GCS/Azure decides to offer Matrix as well?
We don’t expect to be the only SaaS players - but we still think it’s a good market. The more hosting solutions the better - we believe there’s enough customers for everyone to go around :) We‘ve started maintaining a list in matrix.org - and if the big boys started offering Matrix hosting too; it sounds like a good problem to have! (Plus the sort of people interested in Matrix are probably not that interested in buying it from GAFAM ;)
So we expect revenue from SaaS, where plain TCO says it’s cheaper to get us to host your data than pay in-house people to sysadmin it for you. It’s still your DNS and your keys, and we provide db snapshots if you want, so it really is just outsourced hosting. There is definitely a market for this, as well as separately providing support for massive on premise deployments.
P2P then drives both by network effects. It effectively becomes the default free-for-all platform - but anyone who actually wants a serious home for their data (e.g. any business) will want to find a server, whether that’s selfhost or SaaS.