Re: What us mitro's business model?

[Evan Jones]

Easy answers first: The primary server is running in Amazon AWS in the United States. The backup server is running in Google Cloud's "Europe" data center, which is likely in Ireland (Google tries not to specify: https://gigaom.com/2014/03/02/5-things-you-probably-dont-know-about-google-cloud/ )

Legally speaking: Mitro is run by Lectorius Inc, which has no legal relationship to Twitter Inc. It is a wholly owned independent company.

That said: Mitro no longer has a business model, and Lectorius Inc is running it at a loss. We've been trying to figure out a good way to keep Mitro running as a free and open source service. Unfortunately, we have not been able to figure out a way to do that as of yet. To be frank: it is likely that we will decide to shut down the public service sometime next year because we can't afford the time to do a good job maintaining it. (as the delay in responding to this message proves).

Evan

On Nov 20, 2014, at 5:02, Immortalin <hitech...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi, I really love using mitro, but I am not comfortable hosting my passwords on servers ran by a company without a clear profit model. I understand that mitro has joined twitter, so does that mean that twitter is funding the servers for free? Which country is the server based in?

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[Bri Hatch]

On Sun, Nov 23, 2014 at 12:33 PM, Evan Jones <e...@mitro.co> wrote:

That said: Mitro no longer has a business model, and Lectorius Inc is running it at a loss. We've been trying to figure out a good way to keep Mitro running as a free and open source service. Unfortunately, we have not been able to figure out a way to do that as of yet. To be frank: it is likely that we will decide to shut down the public service sometime next year because we can't afford the time to do a good job maintaining it. (as the delay in responding to this message proves).

My company, an enthusiastic and happy user of mitro, needs to either move to something else, or work with the community to make the public service run. We can provide manpower and some dollars. What we don't have is Java coding talent. (Those who do have it, claim otherwise - we're more of a C/python/go/web shop.)

It sounds like we have some folks here who would be interested in either keeping it running for a long time, or keeping it running long enough to figure out how to run personal/corporate copies, rather than relying on the existing system.

Could you provide a guestimate of the cost for the two environments per month, and the amount of time spent "keeping the lights on", which I assume falls into some of the following buckets:

  * responding to support@ requests, most likely those needing their accounts deleted/recreated

  * restarting services

  * monitoring

If the community wanted to keep it on life support longer, we may collectively have enough participants to make it happen.

Perhaps a hangout with interested parties where we can speak with more specifics. If we only have 2 people volunteer to attend the hangout, we know our answer is "no".

--

Bri Hatch, Systems and Security Engineer. http://www.ifokr.org/bri/

I have a deep and profound love for this new licensing set

  up. I get all misty even writing about it.

--matt

[Evan Jones]

Thanks Bri, this is exactly the kind of help we need to keep Mitro running.

1. Support requests, which are mostly "I forgot my password so I need my account deleted" requests. I probably deal with about ~5-10 a week, which takes about an hour or so of my time. If we spent a day or two to implement a self-service delete system it would reduce the time this takes quite a bit.

2. Monitoring: For the most part the service is very reliable. The only exception recently has been when we filled our database disk because we were keeping too many audit logs around. However, the next time there *is* an issue it may take some time to resolve it, since Mitro is now a "when we have time" kind of service.

The above two are really killers: Time is more critical than money at the moment..

3. Service fees: approximately ~$400/month. We could reduce this to nearly zero if we spent the time to migrate the primary to Google Cloud, since I believe we still have a substantial "free trial" credit. I believe that we (Lectorius Inc) can afford to continue running the service for another ~6-12 months without any external support, so at the moment this is less critical (I'll check on the exact numbers if it becomes important for this discussion).

Evan