[franga2000]

> sells cloud hosting to pay the bills, standard protocol with self-hosting option for the server like email/browsers agreed upon decades ago, anyone can create an interoperable desktop/browser/mobile client. Fully encrypted such that even the non-profit doesn't have the decryption keys

All of those are true of Bitwarden, except for the non-profit part...

> Or you could charge individual users $5 a year to cover cloud costs

And who pays for the development?? Bitwarden already charges only 10€/year, so they're basically doing exactly what you're proposing, but paying for development with VC money.

Even if servers were literally free (they're far from it!), do you have any idea how many users they'd need to cover just the minimal amount of developers, one business person and either an in-house or external security auditor? And who would pay for all of that during the time it took them to build up that user base??

I hate the VC culture as much as the next guy, but unless the founder is already crazy rich, you need external capital to start up any large decently company - or even a non-profit.