i want to make a paid subscription service for products that can replace google's and are privacy-respecting. primarily email and messaging apps. all with optional e2e. cross platform, open source, all that good stuff.

after that, maybe add alternatives to google docs, or release a first party phone that runs a mobile os that runs lineage or something.

Not short on ambition!

@F1973 and people call me the wise one 😎

Sadly, free trumps paid.
Unless you can offer more then the competitor, beyond privacy, if privacy was a compelling argument alone, Facebook would be out of business already.

@F1973 no, the few that priorities privacy can never alone finance something like google.

Even with a monthly fee it would stay a niche service which breaks the most important part of googles services, scale.

And not just scale in economy and servers but in data.

Google is data driven, without that data much of their services would never work so its an almost impossible barrier.

Better privacy would mean less data which makes the service less powerful.

Just their search alone is proof.

I have seen the power of that usage when I and colleagues makes the same search and get wildly different results based on search history.

That use of private companies information makes my day more productive since it makes it easier to find the type of answers I need.

Even when the topic has two different meanings, one for development and a very different one outside.

If s non dev made the search they might find the first match of my interest around page 4 or 5 but when I do the same identical search 9out of 10 on first page is relevant for me.

Calm your titties!

Very ambitious.

You have a customer here.

@F1973 that a competition would need first some way to finance it and without storing and using personalized data many of the services will be less effective unfortunately.

@F1973 then I misunderstood your answer to COD4 :)