Why we’re partnering with Ente

A few months ago I moved every photo I own out of Google Photos.

Nothing had gone wrong. Google hadn’t done anything to me. I just stopped feeling comfortable with where all of it was sitting. So I ran a Google Takeout export, waited for the zip files, and moved 15 years of photos and videos over to Ente.

It’s the same instinct that made us build Leave Me Alone in the first place. Your inbox and your photo library are two of the most personal things you own, and both of them are usually sat on a server somewhere in San Francisco, owned by a company that answers to the highest bidder.

Your data just got a lot more valuable

A big thing also just changed. For years, your photos were a storage cost to the companies holding them. Now they’re a raw material.

It looks like everyone is now training an AI model, and everyone needs data to train it on. I’m not saying any particular company is feeding your holiday photos into a model today, and I’ve got no evidence that they are.

But I’m saying the incentive to do it didn’t exist five years ago and it does now.

Terms of service get updated. Products get “improved”.

I’d rather not find out in a “we updated our privacy policy” email that my personal information is now part of some AI shoggoth. Once that happens I know there wont be an undo button.

Small companies have simpler incentives

I don’t necessarily think that small businesses are automatically more ethical than big ones. But the incentives are cleaner, and incentives are what actually decide these things.

A big platform gives you the product for free, then has to answer to advertisers, shareholders, a growth target every quarter. You’re not the customer in that arrangement, you’re just a line item that increases profits.

A small independent company charges you money for a thing, and that’s it. That’s the whole business. You’re the customer, so your interests and theirs point the same way. It’s why we charge the way we do for Leave Me Alone. It keeps us honest, because we don’t have another way to make a living.

So we want to back other companies that work like that. Partly because we like them, and partly because there aren’t many of us, and I’d rather we were all still around in ten years.

Why Ente

Ente is an end-to-end encrypted photo app. It’s the closest thing to Google Photos that doesn’t need to see your photos.

A few reasons we like them:

• It’s open source. All of it. You don’t have to take their word for how it works, you can go and read it.
• You can self-host it. If you’d rather not trust anyone at all, including them, that option is right there.
• It uses AI, but it runs on your device. Face detection, grouping, and natural language search all happen on your phone or laptop, not on their servers. That’s the whole point. You get the useful bits without the model ever gobbling up your photos.
• The app is good. Genuinely very good. I’ve been using it for months and I’ve stopped thinking about it, which is the best thing you can say about software.

Then there’s the bit that sold me properly. Ente has a public API, and I used it to build my wife a small photo feed of her own. She wanted somewhere to share pictures with family without being force-fed addictive doomscrolling.

Now she’s got one, backed by her own encrypted library. You can’t do that with Google Photos.

The deal: 25% off Ente for Leave Me Alone members

So we’re making it official. Ente customers get a deal on Leave Me Alone, and Leave Me Alone customers get a deal for Ente!

So if you’re already a Leave Me Alone customer then you can now get Ente for 25% off.

You can claim the coupon from our new partners page here, just enter the email address you use for your Leave Me Alone account and we’ll send it to your email.

You’ll also now find us on Ente’s friends page, alongside Kagi, Tuta, Notesnook, and Windscribe. If you’re coming from Ente, that’s where your Leave Me Alone deal lives: 10% off the 7-day pass, 45% off the yearly Casual plan, or 65% off yearly Inbox Zero Hero.

Frequently asked questions

Is this an affiliate deal?

No. Neither company earns anything from the other’s sales. The discount replaces what would normally be an affiliate commission, so the value goes to you instead.

How do I claim the 25% off Ente?

Go to our partners page, enter your Leave Me Alone account email, and we’ll send the coupon to your inbox. It applies to any Ente plan for your first year.

Can Ente actually see my photos?

No. Ente uses end-to-end encryption, so photos are encrypted on your device before upload. Their code is public if you want to verify how it works.

I use Ente. What do I get?

Head to Ente’s friends page for your Leave Me Alone discount: up to 65% off our top plan, which includes unlimited unsubscribes for life.

More to come

We’d like to do more of these. There are a handful of small, independent, privacy-first companies we already use ourselves, and we’d rather send you to them than to whatever’s paying for the top ad slot.

No promises on who or when. But if you’re already paying for Leave Me Alone because you want your data left alone, it seems smart for us to point you at the other people doing the same job elsewhere.

If there’s a company you think we should be talking to, send us an email.