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We believe the right long-term answer for Keybase is finding a way to charge large corporations and offer pretty much everything else for free. Obviously there

We believe the right long-term answer for Keybase is finding a way to charge large corporations and offer pretty much everything else for free. Obviously there would have to be some paid tier if you really wanted 10TB of storage or something, but very few people want that right now. We're still just getting started. Of course to achieve our goal, we'll also have to find a way to distinguish communities - which we'll want to use Keybase for free - and companies. Many of us on the team have come from ad-supported businesses and we really, really never want to do that again. I personally guarantee I will never be a "publisher" again. Fortunately that just can't work with Keybase, so no fears there. But charging for anything on Keybase right now would be a big mistake. We only have ~180,000 users, and we want to bring crypto to everyone. That basically means making products we believe are better. Another way of looking at your concern: I think if we were charging right now, it wouldn't actually decrease the odds we disappeared in a few years. It might distract our attention from working on the best product and cause our bloody demise. So maybe we're not choosing the path that gives you the highest impression of safety, but I think we actually are.

eropple 9y ago
OK, awesome. I'm glad you wrote this, because this makes me feel a heck of a lot better about using Keybase. This was in a way my hunch, but I figured--this is something good and cool, I want to make sure it stays good and cool. =) Thanks for the reply.
r0ze-at-hn 9y ago
> Many of us on the team have come from ad-supported businesses and we really, really never want to do that again. I personally guarantee I will never be a "publisher" again. So prove it. Provide a way that customers can try to give you money for solving their problems. Even if it is just a dummy static page with a form to contact your "sales" department, really show that you will be here for the longer term.
- sb8244 9y ago
  Putting up a fake sales page isn't a sales strategy and wouldn't prove anything. If anything, it could add to the distraction. Sales and being around long term are more complicated and won't simply be proven to you because it's what you want. It requires more vision and coherence than that.
  - r0ze-at-hn 9y ago
    It doesn't have to be a fake page, talking about a mvp where they can gauge who is interested in paying and what their problems are so they can concentrate in those areas. When confident they could even setup a simple paypal re-occuring sale system too.
    - johntash 9y ago
      A better(maybe?) idea could be to send out a survey asking what features people are interested in, whether they would be willing to pay for them, and how much if so. It could be an option when you log in to the UI. I wouldn't mind it, as long as it isn't being e-mailed to me every week/month.
acobster 9y ago
This is a fantastic answer, and I wish more folks were this dedicated to making sure they have something great before trying to hawk it. That said, I do wish I could pay for (at least) a TB of Keybase storage right now. :D
- EGreg 9y ago
  David Heinemeier Hansson and the Basecamp guys would disagree :)
  - 1123581321 9y ago
    I think Keybase is more like what Joel Spolsky describes as a "horizontal company" that's appropriate to try to build after already having made money. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-different/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-diff...
    - r0ze-at-hn 9y ago
      From Joel's article: > That means that our highest priority is removing any obstacles to adoption. Anything that people might use as a reason not to use Trello has to be found and eliminated. In this case I am weary of using something like this that is free because I have seen so many things in the past that were free only to shutdown rapidly after they grew in size, but with no way to pay for themselves and had to pivot or sell out. So being free is actually an obstacle in adoption.
      - jcahill 9y ago
        Fortunately, Trello's free plan limits are so low that very little of substance will be lost.
      - dasil003 9y ago
        I am intimately aware of this frustration, but what's the alternative? Stable companies also kill or abandon projects. The whole software and consumer product ecosystems are constantly churning. Personally I'm old enough that I don't have to try every new service, but if something is solving a real problem in the short-term, I will give it a try and hope for the best. Keybase is definitely in this bucket. Worst case they go away and I have to come up with a different solution, but right now it's adding tremendous value.
QuinnWilton 9y ago
Everything you just said makes perfect sense. That being said, I think Keybase is one of the most important companies around right now. I would gladly pay $10/month, even if literally all it did was put a "Supporter" badge on my profile. I'm sure hundreds of other people agree. Crypto is far too important for it to remain locked away behind GPG.
- HarfTarf 9y ago
  I too would pay for a "supporter badge".
  - leesalminen 9y ago
    I would happily pay $10/month just to support the business. I don’t even need extra features. Please ask me for money.
- malgorithms 9y ago
  The outpouring of positive energy (on HN!) is really inspiring. Everyone on the Keybase team is feeling good about our work right now, so thanks!
  - QuinnWilton 9y ago
    The team seriously deserves it. For what it's worth, I think my above comment is my highest upvoted comment of all time. There's a lot of people out there who want Keybase to succeed.
    - eropple 9y ago
      My comment that started this subthread is in my top ten, and I have been here entirely too long, so, yeah. Keybase is good. It staying around is important. People around here, at least, seem to know it, and that's awesome.
  - marksomnian 9y ago
    Get off HN and take my money already. Seriously. I'd gladly pay you money for nothing, a "supporter" badge would only be a nice bonus
notheguyouthink 9y ago
Piggybacking off of the original question, I too have a question in this scope: With all the products you're offering, is there any indication which products will be staples of Keybase? Eg, I'm always hesitant of the "Google Product", where something gets added only to be abandoned ~1yr later after it doesn't gain the traction the company expected. For example, I'd love to get my wife and I switched to Keybase Chat from Telegram. With that said, I love the features of Telegram, they're killing it for me honestly, but I can't expect Keybase to compete with Telegram unless they're really invested in it. So which products from Keybase are one-off experiments, and which are long-roadmapped products - expected to have continued development and support for years to come? I'm having trouble understanding what to trust. Note, none of this is critical to Keybase. I'm wary of startups in general, despite loving you guys, so I'm just seeking understanding. I appreciate whatever information you can give me, even if small :)
- woolvalley 9y ago
  Why not use signal?
  - unlmtd1 9y ago
    Neither keybase chat nor signal are the future of communication; matrix is.
  - iivarih 9y ago
    Signal only provides chat functionality... And doesn't support multiple devices... Also the history is lost on device change (or upgrade/reset etc)... And you cannot chat with people who you don't trust with your phone number
- zamber 9y ago
  My best guess as an uninformed lurker and a Keybase user is that it's too early to know. You would have to know what's the impact of "sunsetting" features and for that you probably need more than 180k early adopters. In case of chat you can always fallback to Telegram (I've done that after trying to move people to Wire). In case of git you can always move the repo. With the setup that's there now I can see how it could be used as the main origin along with a push to GitHub hook. Pull requests would be even mergable (blessed be Torvalds), though I'm not 100% sure if GitHub would pick up on that and autoclose the PR.
desireco42 9y ago
What you said is music to my ears... I share concern. I love you guys and thank you for amazing work you did so far. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
chipx86 9y ago
Throwing my "I <3 Keybase" comment in the ring while doing some brainstorming here. It seems to me that there's a lot of product opportunities in the corporate world that go beyond what Keybase is providing today. Chat and Git are interesting, but there's already a lot of momentum in both these areas. Been thinking how I use encryption and where things fall short today. One of those areas is build signing and hardware key management for our team. Everything that goes on our servers get signed by an official PGP key. Only a couple people can sign builds, and each has a Yubikey with PGP subkeys on it. This is kind of annoying to manage. We use an airgapped computer that houses the private key, can create subkeys and assign to Yubikeys, can handle expiration management, etc. When we want to deal with this, we have to get the computer, unlock access, and deal with the command line. This is error-prone and annoying. Having a solution that allows for safe storage of a private key and easy management of subkeys on smartcards would be amazing without the need for an airgapped computer and a command line would be really interesting. (The signing/verification part can probably be handled today by the keybase tool.) Okay, that's maybe more specialized. Let's move away from paranoid server builds and go toward something similar that's gotten plenty of companies in trouble: Malicious e-mails. How often are we hearing about some poor employee receiving an e-mail that appears to come from a co-worker that contains a finance document with a trojan? Or maybe just a simple document with a form, instructions, and a link that results in information leaked to some third-party? If there was a dead-simple way to sign and validate documents over Keybase (and I mean dead-simple, built for people who only know Word and Excel), for use in e-mail and document management, with marketing around "For $XX/user/month, you don't have to worry about getting hacked," I bet plenty of companies would bite. I don't know what that looks like exactly, but just playing around loosely with some thoughts, it would be interesting (particularly for fully IT-managed systems) to have a Keybase Shield product that would automate much of the signing and verification of documents. It could tie into Word, Excel, etc. via their plugin interface and sign on save, and/or provide a big "Sign this document" widget on the side of the screen that a document can be dropped onto (or a Share action on phones). It'd then own the file associations for these documents, intercepting them when opening via e-mail or file servers, and would validate their signature. A document from the outside world (or one not going through the corporate-mandated signature process) would outright fail to open with an error message and instructions to ask the sender to please sign the document. (Lots of details to work out there, but if this process could be made simple and mostly automatic, you'd help close a major attack vector that companies are susceptible to today.) Anyway, it's great hearing your thoughts on how Keybase plans to make money. I've been in the same boat of loving Keybase but being uncertain about where it'll be 5 years from now. We'll keep an eye open for some paid products :)
brazzledazzle 9y ago
I'm (unfortunately, at times) intimately familiar with what big corporate IT departments look for in terms of features, authentication, RBAC, auditing, etc., etc. in "Enterprise" products and if you need it I'd be willing to help you understand what we look for and why. Feel free to drop me a line. Either way, I love what you're doing and I hope you nail it.
- alanh 9y ago
  Not affiliated with Keybase, but I’d love to get your perspective on those things. I don’t see a way to contact you in your HN bio. Send me a note? https://alanhogan.com/contact?reason=corporate%20IT%20dept%20needs https://alanhogan.com/contact?reason=corporate%20IT%20dept%2... (Anyone else with relevant thoughts on what IT needs around encryption, recovery, key backup, etc, please feel free to write me, too)
unlmtd1 9y ago
Large corporations are all on the verge of bankruptcy.
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
The enterprise would be a valid target, but if you really want them to trust you, you'll need to offer localized hosting (host from EU, Russian, Chinese datacenters) as well as on-premise hosting. Actually, in that last one you should probably also offer consultancy to set up the servers securely - both software and physical hardware security. Secure software isn't worth much if the systems it runs on is compromised. Consultancy can be worth a lot of money, if your customers think it's worth it. I'd start working on offering a paid enterprise solution soon tbf. I'd also tweak your landing page, the blurb is "a new and free security app"; the "new and free" doesn't instill much trust, and the "security app" doesn't really describe what it does. The second phrase tries to explain that "it's Slack" or "it's Dropbox", which I guess is fair, but I'd aim towards distancing yourself and describe it as e.g. "End-to-end encrypted communications and file sharing". What makes Keybase unique? I mean Dropbox has a pretty solid security page (https://www.dropbox.com/business/trust/security/architecture https://www.dropbox.com/business/trust/security/architecture), as does Slack (https://slack.com/security https://slack.com/security).
- zamber 9y ago
  > localized hosting IIRC it boils down to a new Merkle root and a self-hosted server instance that uses it. Add snapshot pushing to the blockchain and you've got yourself an independent Keybase instance with a fresh and clean database ready to be filled with employees. I wonder what the identity proof adding would look like. I guess corporations are not interested in public proofs from Twitter.
- beaner 9y ago
  If you're going to host locally doesn't it matter much less that it's encrypted? You could just use github enterprise.

eropple 9y ago

OK, awesome. I'm glad you wrote this, because this makes me feel a heck of a lot better about using Keybase. This was in a way my hunch, but I figured--this is something good and cool, I want to make sure it stays good and cool. =) Thanks for the reply.

r0ze-at-hn 9y ago

> Many of us on the team have come from ad-supported businesses and we really, really never want to do that again. I personally guarantee I will never be a "publisher" again. So prove it. Provide a way that customers can try to give you money for solving their problems. Even if it is just a dummy static page with a form to contact your "sales" department, really show that you will be here for the longer term.

sb8244 9y ago
Putting up a fake sales page isn't a sales strategy and wouldn't prove anything. If anything, it could add to the distraction. Sales and being around long term are more complicated and won't simply be proven to you because it's what you want. It requires more vision and coherence than that.
- r0ze-at-hn 9y ago
  It doesn't have to be a fake page, talking about a mvp where they can gauge who is interested in paying and what their problems are so they can concentrate in those areas. When confident they could even setup a simple paypal re-occuring sale system too.
  - johntash 9y ago
    A better(maybe?) idea could be to send out a survey asking what features people are interested in, whether they would be willing to pay for them, and how much if so. It could be an option when you log in to the UI. I wouldn't mind it, as long as it isn't being e-mailed to me every week/month.

acobster 9y ago

This is a fantastic answer, and I wish more folks were this dedicated to making sure they have something great before trying to hawk it. That said, I do wish I could pay for (at least) a TB of Keybase storage right now. :D

EGreg 9y ago
David Heinemeier Hansson and the Basecamp guys would disagree :)
- 1123581321 9y ago
  I think Keybase is more like what Joel Spolsky describes as a "horizontal company" that's appropriate to try to build after already having made money. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-different/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-diff...
  - r0ze-at-hn 9y ago
    From Joel's article: > That means that our highest priority is removing any obstacles to adoption. Anything that people might use as a reason not to use Trello has to be found and eliminated. In this case I am weary of using something like this that is free because I have seen so many things in the past that were free only to shutdown rapidly after they grew in size, but with no way to pay for themselves and had to pivot or sell out. So being free is actually an obstacle in adoption.
    - jcahill 9y ago
      Fortunately, Trello's free plan limits are so low that very little of substance will be lost.
    - dasil003 9y ago
      I am intimately aware of this frustration, but what's the alternative? Stable companies also kill or abandon projects. The whole software and consumer product ecosystems are constantly churning. Personally I'm old enough that I don't have to try every new service, but if something is solving a real problem in the short-term, I will give it a try and hope for the best. Keybase is definitely in this bucket. Worst case they go away and I have to come up with a different solution, but right now it's adding tremendous value.

QuinnWilton 9y ago

Everything you just said makes perfect sense. That being said, I think Keybase is one of the most important companies around right now. I would gladly pay $10/month, even if literally all it did was put a "Supporter" badge on my profile. I'm sure hundreds of other people agree. Crypto is far too important for it to remain locked away behind GPG.

HarfTarf 9y ago
I too would pay for a "supporter badge".
- leesalminen 9y ago
  I would happily pay $10/month just to support the business. I don’t even need extra features. Please ask me for money.
malgorithms 9y ago
The outpouring of positive energy (on HN!) is really inspiring. Everyone on the Keybase team is feeling good about our work right now, so thanks!
- QuinnWilton 9y ago
  The team seriously deserves it. For what it's worth, I think my above comment is my highest upvoted comment of all time. There's a lot of people out there who want Keybase to succeed.
  - eropple 9y ago
    My comment that started this subthread is in my top ten, and I have been here entirely too long, so, yeah. Keybase is good. It staying around is important. People around here, at least, seem to know it, and that's awesome.
- marksomnian 9y ago
  Get off HN and take my money already. Seriously. I'd gladly pay you money for nothing, a "supporter" badge would only be a nice bonus

notheguyouthink 9y ago

Piggybacking off of the original question, I too have a question in this scope: With all the products you're offering, is there any indication which products will be staples of Keybase? Eg, I'm always hesitant of the "Google Product", where something gets added only to be abandoned ~1yr later after it doesn't gain the traction the company expected. For example, I'd love to get my wife and I switched to Keybase Chat from Telegram. With that said, I love the features of Telegram, they're killing it for me honestly, but I can't expect Keybase to compete with Telegram unless they're really invested in it. So which products from Keybase are one-off experiments, and which are long-roadmapped products - expected to have continued development and support for years to come? I'm having trouble understanding what to trust. Note, none of this is critical to Keybase. I'm wary of startups in general, despite loving you guys, so I'm just seeking understanding. I appreciate whatever information you can give me, even if small :)

woolvalley 9y ago
Why not use signal?
- unlmtd1 9y ago
  Neither keybase chat nor signal are the future of communication; matrix is.
- iivarih 9y ago
  Signal only provides chat functionality... And doesn't support multiple devices... Also the history is lost on device change (or upgrade/reset etc)... And you cannot chat with people who you don't trust with your phone number
zamber 9y ago
My best guess as an uninformed lurker and a Keybase user is that it's too early to know. You would have to know what's the impact of "sunsetting" features and for that you probably need more than 180k early adopters. In case of chat you can always fallback to Telegram (I've done that after trying to move people to Wire). In case of git you can always move the repo. With the setup that's there now I can see how it could be used as the main origin along with a push to GitHub hook. Pull requests would be even mergable (blessed be Torvalds), though I'm not 100% sure if GitHub would pick up on that and autoclose the PR.

desireco42 9y ago

What you said is music to my ears... I share concern. I love you guys and thank you for amazing work you did so far. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

chipx86 9y ago

Throwing my "I <3 Keybase" comment in the ring while doing some brainstorming here. It seems to me that there's a lot of product opportunities in the corporate world that go beyond what Keybase is providing today. Chat and Git are interesting, but there's already a lot of momentum in both these areas. Been thinking how I use encryption and where things fall short today. One of those areas is build signing and hardware key management for our team. Everything that goes on our servers get signed by an official PGP key. Only a couple people can sign builds, and each has a Yubikey with PGP subkeys on it. This is kind of annoying to manage. We use an airgapped computer that houses the private key, can create subkeys and assign to Yubikeys, can handle expiration management, etc. When we want to deal with this, we have to get the computer, unlock access, and deal with the command line. This is error-prone and annoying. Having a solution that allows for safe storage of a private key and easy management of subkeys on smartcards would be amazing without the need for an airgapped computer and a command line would be really interesting. (The signing/verification part can probably be handled today by the keybase tool.) Okay, that's maybe more specialized. Let's move away from paranoid server builds and go toward something similar that's gotten plenty of companies in trouble: Malicious e-mails. How often are we hearing about some poor employee receiving an e-mail that appears to come from a co-worker that contains a finance document with a trojan? Or maybe just a simple document with a form, instructions, and a link that results in information leaked to some third-party? If there was a dead-simple way to sign and validate documents over Keybase (and I mean dead-simple, built for people who only know Word and Excel), for use in e-mail and document management, with marketing around "For $XX/user/month, you don't have to worry about getting hacked," I bet plenty of companies would bite. I don't know what that looks like exactly, but just playing around loosely with some thoughts, it would be interesting (particularly for fully IT-managed systems) to have a Keybase Shield product that would automate much of the signing and verification of documents. It could tie into Word, Excel, etc. via their plugin interface and sign on save, and/or provide a big "Sign this document" widget on the side of the screen that a document can be dropped onto (or a Share action on phones). It'd then own the file associations for these documents, intercepting them when opening via e-mail or file servers, and would validate their signature. A document from the outside world (or one not going through the corporate-mandated signature process) would outright fail to open with an error message and instructions to ask the sender to please sign the document. (Lots of details to work out there, but if this process could be made simple and mostly automatic, you'd help close a major attack vector that companies are susceptible to today.) Anyway, it's great hearing your thoughts on how Keybase plans to make money. I've been in the same boat of loving Keybase but being uncertain about where it'll be 5 years from now. We'll keep an eye open for some paid products :)

brazzledazzle 9y ago

I'm (unfortunately, at times) intimately familiar with what big corporate IT departments look for in terms of features, authentication, RBAC, auditing, etc., etc. in "Enterprise" products and if you need it I'd be willing to help you understand what we look for and why. Feel free to drop me a line. Either way, I love what you're doing and I hope you nail it.

alanh 9y ago
Not affiliated with Keybase, but I’d love to get your perspective on those things. I don’t see a way to contact you in your HN bio. Send me a note? https://alanhogan.com/contact?reason=corporate%20IT%20dept%20needs https://alanhogan.com/contact?reason=corporate%20IT%20dept%2... (Anyone else with relevant thoughts on what IT needs around encryption, recovery, key backup, etc, please feel free to write me, too)

unlmtd1 9y ago

Large corporations are all on the verge of bankruptcy.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago

The enterprise would be a valid target, but if you really want them to trust you, you'll need to offer localized hosting (host from EU, Russian, Chinese datacenters) as well as on-premise hosting. Actually, in that last one you should probably also offer consultancy to set up the servers securely - both software and physical hardware security. Secure software isn't worth much if the systems it runs on is compromised. Consultancy can be worth a lot of money, if your customers think it's worth it. I'd start working on offering a paid enterprise solution soon tbf. I'd also tweak your landing page, the blurb is "a new and free security app"; the "new and free" doesn't instill much trust, and the "security app" doesn't really describe what it does. The second phrase tries to explain that "it's Slack" or "it's Dropbox", which I guess is fair, but I'd aim towards distancing yourself and describe it as e.g. "End-to-end encrypted communications and file sharing". What makes Keybase unique? I mean Dropbox has a pretty solid security page (https://www.dropbox.com/business/trust/security/architecture https://www.dropbox.com/business/trust/security/architecture), as does Slack (https://slack.com/security https://slack.com/security).

zamber 9y ago
> localized hosting IIRC it boils down to a new Merkle root and a self-hosted server instance that uses it. Add snapshot pushing to the blockchain and you've got yourself an independent Keybase instance with a fresh and clean database ready to be filled with employees. I wonder what the identity proof adding would look like. I guess corporations are not interested in public proofs from Twitter.
beaner 9y ago
If you're going to host locally doesn't it matter much less that it's encrypted? You could just use github enterprise.