Gebna is a super-app that provides all the common software an average person needs. This includes (but not limited to): email, cloud storage, notes, calendar, documents, slides, sheets, news feed (newsletters + RSS), and more.
A certain level of power must never be allowed to exist. I wholeheartedly believe that. Google, Apple, and Microsoft have so much hold over your digital life. So much so that you can't imagine using your laptop/phone or accessing the internet without depending on at least one of their services. The insight and the hold they have over our digital life (which usually co-insides with our physical life) is unfathomable. The insight is being sold to companies that are actively (and very quickly) developing dystopian surveillance systems. The hold is being used so that we get to a point where we can't make a simple transaction without being approved by some institution. From the information you consume to the currency you use, No matter where you live in the world: You are enslaved.
We can do better. I'm not saying this in a hollow-motivational manner. I actually mean it. It's actually not that hard and it won't take 10 years. From opensource software to easy and cheap cloud providers. Pair that with LLMs and coding agents. And we have a recipe for building competing with silicon valley without needing billions in funding or an army of programmers.
Yes. NextCloud, Stalwart, Immich, and many more truly awesome projects already exist. If you possess the technical know-how and the time required to run and maintain your own email server, file server, etc, by all means feel free to do so. But for the vast majority of the human population on this planet, we need a hyper-accessible, super easy offering. and that offering is Gebna.
The focus of Gebna is providing quality software for the average person. That means a cloud-first approach makes the most sense for us. And by us, I mean me. And since it's just me for now, I'm only going to focus on the cloud offering. I simply don't have time to work on this and provide documentation and support for self-hosters. For anyone interested in running their own digital infrastructure, I recommend reading: [Introduction to a Self Managed Life: a 13 hour & 28 minute presentation by FUTO software] (https://wiki.futo.org/index.php/Introduction_to_a_Self_Managed_Life:_a_13_hour_%26_28_minute_presentation_by_FUTO_software)
Very simple, a user is a customer. They wanna use this, they have to pay for it. This is how software was distributed before the deformed ad-centric web arrived by the hands of companies like Google and Facebook.
How much exactly?
I don't know at the moment. But I'll try to make it as affordable as possible while enabling Gebna to grow and improve.
But Google offers 15GB for free. How will you compete?
You're right. We can't compete with any free-tier. But the goal is to make it sustainable for us to be able to have competitive pricing compared to their paid tiers.
Keep in mind that we might go for a usage-based model instead of tiered subscriptions. As I think the way subscriptions are implemented today is predatory.