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The economics of this are curious actually. Element has had investments from Automattic, VCs and Status.im (no governments, ftr). However, the only reason peopl

The economics of this are curious actually. Element has had investments from Automattic, VCs and Status.im (no governments, ftr). However, the only reason people invest is in the expectation that Element can be a sustainable healthy business - which it does so by providing Matrix SaaS hosting, and support/consulting for big on premise deployments. In other words, it’s critical that folks use the managed hosting in order to be sustainable, otherwise we’re just burning fossil fuel, as it were.

rglullis 6y ago
I misspoke. I wanted to say that the money from the governments are part of the revenue as "support/consulting for big on-premise deployments". Sorry about that. In any case, I would be surprised that Element relies on getting significant part of their revenue from the SaaS. Isn't p2p-matrix going to cannibalize that market? I could swear that the strategy for you would be to chase the enterprise/government market and let p2p-matrix as an alternative for network effects and/or those who don't want to pay and prefer to manage things themselves.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  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.
  - rglullis 6y ago
    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?
    - Arathorn 6y ago
      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 ;)
29083011397778 6y ago
Currently, I send (the batched equivalent of) $10/month on Libera Pay and run my own homeserver - is there a meaningful difference between this and using the paid/sponsorship hosting? I'm especially curious about the effects individually and in aggregate; I.E. if everyone did what I do.
- Arathorn 6y ago
  Both are super useful. Donations go to the Matrix.org Foundation and help pay for core team dev, but also are really useful for pointing bigger donors at to say “look, we get $4K/month on Patreon + Liberapay etc; this shows we are a good project to back; how about you match it?” Buying hosting from Element however also funnels back to fund core Matrix dev - because almost all of Element’s work is donated (unilaterally, in an asset lock) to the Matrix.org Foundation. In other words, anything an Element employee commits into https://github.com/matrix-org https://github.com/matrix-org automatically becomes the copyright assigned to the Foundation. This also has the separate multiplying factor that the more evidence there is to run a sustainable SaaS business on Matrix, the easier it is for Element to raise funds and keep going - and thus continue to support the core Matrix dev. Sorry it’s so complicated, but funding FOSS is fiddly (as Mozilla demonstrates...) P.S. thank you for donating!!

rglullis 6y ago

I misspoke. I wanted to say that the money from the governments are part of the revenue as "support/consulting for big on-premise deployments". Sorry about that. In any case, I would be surprised that Element relies on getting significant part of their revenue from the SaaS. Isn't p2p-matrix going to cannibalize that market? I could swear that the strategy for you would be to chase the enterprise/government market and let p2p-matrix as an alternative for network effects and/or those who don't want to pay and prefer to manage things themselves.

Arathorn 6y ago
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.
- rglullis 6y ago
  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?
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    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 ;)

29083011397778 6y ago

Currently, I send (the batched equivalent of) $10/month on Libera Pay and run my own homeserver - is there a meaningful difference between this and using the paid/sponsorship hosting? I'm especially curious about the effects individually and in aggregate; I.E. if everyone did what I do.

Arathorn 6y ago
Both are super useful. Donations go to the Matrix.org Foundation and help pay for core team dev, but also are really useful for pointing bigger donors at to say “look, we get $4K/month on Patreon + Liberapay etc; this shows we are a good project to back; how about you match it?” Buying hosting from Element however also funnels back to fund core Matrix dev - because almost all of Element’s work is donated (unilaterally, in an asset lock) to the Matrix.org Foundation. In other words, anything an Element employee commits into https://github.com/matrix-org https://github.com/matrix-org automatically becomes the copyright assigned to the Foundation. This also has the separate multiplying factor that the more evidence there is to run a sustainable SaaS business on Matrix, the easier it is for Element to raise funds and keep going - and thus continue to support the core Matrix dev. Sorry it’s so complicated, but funding FOSS is fiddly (as Mozilla demonstrates...) P.S. thank you for donating!!