I've been playing around with Ente's free tier and I like it so far. Most importantly, it's steadily improving and the developers have said they're already profitable with the expectation of even more growth in the future. They also said they're staying focused on their current projects rather than rushing to create more apps. Even if they were to end service, which seems unlikely given their sustainable trajectory, they have done a good job so far at preserving data portability.
Their local AI search feature also appears to actually beat some big tech products like OneDrive and Amazon Photos. Google Photos is still king for that feature and comes with more bells and whistles, but comes wiith privacy concerns. I'm optimistic for Ente.
Ente does have some usability hiccups due to client side machine learning indexing rather than doing the indexing on their servers. You can't just let it automatically upload from your phone and forget about it like you would with Google Photos since the Ente app needs to be open for it to do the processing. They actually recommend doing the indexing on a desktop client which tend to be more powerful than phones.
For them, it's probably a win win where they can offer better privacy while limiting the need for powerful servers capable of machine learning for all their customers. The users' own devices do the machine learning indexing and then upload encrypted versions of these results to the servers that can be synced to your different clients. This model scales really really well for growing their user base..
For me, it's more of a matter of getting my family members on board with the switch. I'd also to find another home for my uncompressed video files that surpass their current 10 GB file size limit.
In the future, when they have the users to support it, I'd like them to lower their prices to be more competitive with the big players so it would be easier to convince people to switch. Currently, it's a good value for privacy focused people who would never touch Google Photos since it's far better than other current encrypted photo storage like Proton Drive. It's also significantly easier (and potentially cheaper) than self-hosting (depends on your storage requirements and if you're self-hosting other things or not).
They do also let you self-host it. If my understanding is correct, it might even be able to run off less capable server hardware than alternatives, like Immich, since the processing is done by the clients whereas Immich does it on the server.