Trovebox – We Are Shutting Down | Hacker News Reader

Trovebox – We Are Shutting Down

trovebox.com

7 pointsvrypan6 comments

I'm one of the founders. Happy to answer any questions (as well as I can).

It sounds like you've been considering shutting down for about a year, but you didn't tell your users until today?

There were numerous times over the past 3 1/2 years that we thought we would have to shut down.

Informing users about our shutdown was more complicated than simply sending an email out. It took a long time to "figure things out" and there were other parties involved in that process.

That being said, we are shutting down as gracefully as possible. Offering extended period downloads, export to S3 and "self-hosting" your own Trovebox and migrating your data there.

I'm sorry to hear it. I've seen you guys posting on HN over the past year or two, particularly on topics like Everpix.

While I mourn the loss of Everpix and Trovebox, I'm baffled as to the market's failure to replace them. I'm now a very happy user of Google+ as my Everpix replacement, and Dropbox seems to be pursuing the same market with their Carousel acquisition. But G+ (and presumably Dropbox) still lacks essential features that Everpix had, like deduplication, automatic ordering by date, e-mail flashbacks, etc etc.

I never tried Trovebox, but I'm very sorry to hear that you're shutting down. Though I honestly can't see how even a giant like Dropbox can compete in this market, much less a startup. The cloud is served by economies of scale, and Amazon, Google, and Microsoft seem to be the only possible competitors in the long run.

Thanks. It really is a brutal space to be in. I blogged at the beginning of 2014 about why we left the consumer space for the business space [1].

The "fork" of Trovebox that is mentioned in the shutdown email is what we should have been working on all along. But it took us 3 1/2 years to figure that out. I don't think we could have taken a shortcut here. Now we have the backing of a big company to make that happen. It's bittersweet but also exciting.

[1] https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-phot...

I'm a big fan of the current Trovebox product for hosting on my own, are there any projects out there that have similar functionality to what Trovebox currently offers that can be hosted?

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