I think ente does fill a niche, people don't mind paying dollars for companies because it is supposed to guarantee a level of service/polish. And in the case of photos, if the service were to shut down, there's very likely a path one can take to perform a migration.
I'm a big user of open source solutions, I use Linux on my machine and use syncthing to sync files across all my devices. I'm aware that my solution is not doable for everyone and that's the problem with most open source solutions, the lack of polish/ease of use. There are tons of systems that aren't open source that we are forced to rely upon for day to day, airplane software, traffic lights, telecommunications) and we've just accepted it because of convenience and trust.
What I'm trying to say is that we don't have to worry about self-hosting everything and force ourselves to only use open source tools. I do think that if we do use private tools, we should understand how our data can be exported to a new system if necessary so we're not "locked in".
Standard Notes seems like a good example of this balance to me. While you can self host, I assume 99% of people don't. It must be an option, otherwise I wouldn't use it.
I'm a big user of open source solutions, I use Linux on my machine and use syncthing to sync files across all my devices. I'm aware that my solution is not doable for everyone and that's the problem with most open source solutions, the lack of polish/ease of use. There are tons of systems that aren't open source that we are forced to rely upon for day to day, airplane software, traffic lights, telecommunications) and we've just accepted it because of convenience and trust.
What I'm trying to say is that we don't have to worry about self-hosting everything and force ourselves to only use open source tools. I do think that if we do use private tools, we should understand how our data can be exported to a new system if necessary so we're not "locked in".