Hello everyone,
Before I head into the details of this blog post, I want to first and foremost make clear that this was not an easy decision, and that it was not made lightly, and that this is one of the hardest decisions I've had to make to date. This decision is not based on any one thing, or anything that happened recently, but it is a culmination of months and months of thinking and discussing this with friends and family.
I am writing this blog post, and all of its details within, in the hopes that you all can understand why I had to make this decision.
I started Simply Plural in 2020/2021 as a small app to use for friends and family. As word spread of the app, more people became interested and wanted to get access, so that they can use it for their friends and family. A few months later, the app had already grown to 300-400 daily users. After this, the app kept getting positive feedback and I saw how much the app helped people, so I decided to work on this project a lot more during my evenings, weekends and vacation days. This all started taking off in 2021/2022 when the world looked very different and I had a lot of free time to spend during the evening and weekends. I regularly released updates and the app was continuously growing, and everything was going well. By 2023 there were over 200.000 registered users, with 10.000 to 15.000 daily active users.
During the initial 2 to 3 years of development of the app I had dedicated entire weekends, entire 2 week vacations, entire evenings for weeks on end, to develop and maintain the app. But with such dedication came a lot of fatigue, stress and deterioration of other aspects of my life as well.
As time went on, life changed and priorities changed. Meanwhile, Ive tried to keep developing, supporting, and maintaining the app despite having less free time. But, the rate at which I was able to release new updates slowed down, and the amount of time I had to resolve bugs and issues became more constrained.
On top of that, together with the development and maintenance of the app, a whole lot of background work, that no one sees, is involved for providing this app. People send emails to Apparyllis with issues with their accounts, the servers have to be maintained, I have to resolve incidents such as the servers going down, I have to triage and prioritize bugs that get reported, and I have to keep up with bookkeeping and management of the company Apparyllis itself.
That brings us to today, where the work behind the scenes has also grown over the last year or two, to a point where any free time I do find, it's usually spent on answering emails, doing upkeep, management and generally providing support. This leaves virtually no time that I can spend on actually developing the app further.
To put it in perspective, Simply Plural has over 500.000 registered users by now, and over 100 million(!) front entries in the Simply Plural database. These numbers are astronomical for an app developed and maintained by a single developer, and it puts a tremendous amount of responsibility and stress on me for the upkeep and maintenance.
However, I've tried to find ways to find more free time, or reorganize my time in a different way, but I am unable to do so without compromising on aspects of my life and family that are currently more important. Having prioritized the app for half a decade now, I instead now have to prioritize my family, friends and myself.
Therefore, as of today, the development of Simply Plural will be discontinued, however, the app will remain downloadable and usable for now. I will also continue to maintain the servers for the foreseeable future, and continue to resolve incidents such as the servers going down, as well as fixing any critical or security bugs, but no new feature updates will be released.
While my time is limited, I want to ensure that people can still access a tool they need to manage their plurality, and I will continue to maintain the servers for as long as I can, to give people the chance to migrate to another app or tool. For any questions you may have about this announcement, I've added a few questions and answers at the bottom of this post.
But before I finish off this announcement, I would like to personally thank the patrons, simply plus subscribers, and The Plural Association, who have supported this app for the past five years. Without you, this project would not have been possible, and I can't thank you enough for making it possible to keep it going for as long as it did.
And a special thank you to the current and past helpers and moderators of the Discord server, which have helped users with their problems over the years, and have helped us greatly in reducing the workload of providing support for the app. Their time and commitment for this community have not gone unnoticed and I wish to give them my deepest thanks.
And as a final note, I understand that this decision may be difficult to accept. However, over the past five to six years of working on and maintaining the app, I have never asked for anything in return, but I do have one request now: Please respect my decision.
Questions & Answers
How long will the servers remain online?
I unfortunately cannot give you a clear answer, it depends on various factors. One of which is funding, if people stop subscribing to Patreon and Simply Plus in response to this decision, this would speed up the timeline, as we cannot keep them online without funding. Secondly, it depends on how manageable the reduced workload will be for us. However, at the bare minimum we wish to keep the servers online until at least June 1st 2026, and in the event funding becomes a problem until then, we'll fund the servers for the remaining time ourselves. In any case, we will be giving a formal notice one to two months prior to shutting down the servers.
What happens to Patreon & Simply Plus?
Patreon and Simply Plus will remain online for now, as long as the servers are online we'll give the opportunity for people to keep supporting the upkeep of the servers.
What happens to people's active subscriptions?
A month prior to shutting the servers down, we will be preventing people from being able to create new subscriptions, and we will cancel all existing subscriptions so that they end before the shutdown date. Secondly, as of today, yearly subscriptions will be disabled for new subscriptions, and anyone who has a yearly subscription that extends past the shutdown date, will get a refund prorated for the time remaining on their subscription. This refund will not need any input from your end, we'll do this for everyone automatically.
What happens to user data and avatars?
To comply with legal requirements and to respect the privacy of our users, once we officially shut down the servers, the data and avatars associated with users will be permanently deleted. However, users will have a chance to export their user data and avatars under "Settings -> Account Settings -> Export your data" before this date. To prevent overloading the servers, we would ask you to not rush to exporting your user data right after this announcement. We will give sufficient up-front notice before the servers are shut down, to give everyone a chance to export in time.
What other tools exist to replace Simply Plural?
PluralKit(Website/Discord), and the Octocon(Android/Apple/Discord) app, are both an alternative to Simply Plural, which are both available for free.
Should you wish to migrate to PluralKit, you can do so from the app under "Settings -> Integrations -> Pluralkit -> Export". If you wish your members to be publicly visible on PluralKit, ensure you disable the "Export new members as private" option.
We've also spoken with Octocon's developer to ensure that a smooth transition can take place should you wish to migrate to their platform. A guide on migrating your SP data to Octocon can read here.
What happens to the app when the servers go down?
The app will start to say it can't find a connection to the servers, and you can choose to use the app offline. However, the offline support was not made with prolonged (days/weeks/months) offline usage in mind, so over time the app may start to act weird or different than usual. While offline mode is active you can use most features of the app, but some functionality such as friends or board messages, which rely on a connection to the server will not work.
Are there plans to open source the app or allow self hosting?
A decision whether the app will be open source after the servers go down hasn't been made yet, but I will report back once a decision has been made regarding that. Self hosting is considered, and we will gauge interest with a poll in a few days. How self hosting would function or look like will be decided afterwards.
Would it help to have big donations or fundraisers?
No, the problem is not the funding of the servers but my free and personal time. While subscribing and being a patron will help with keeping the servers up longer, eventually we will have to shut them down.
Why not hire people or get volunteers?
This isn't an issue of money or volunteers or anything else other than my free time. On the topic of hiring someone, Patreon and Simply Plus barely make us break even, we've never ever gotten a single cent in our personal pockets from providing this app. Hiring someone is too expensive, and even if all of a sudden thousands upon thousands start subscribing to give us the funds to hire someone, we won't. Hiring someone doesn't magically resolve my time issue, managing people takes a lot of time and effort, time I do not have. Volunteers are the same, if not more time consuming, to manage.
Neither can volunteers help with providing work for the background work we do. Every email that comes in contains private information, and requires us to access their account, volunteers shouldn't be given access to that level of data. Managing servers is even more dangerous, we cannot trust anyone with the user data of half a million people.
As I've stated in the blog post, the bulk of the work lately is not development, but management and support, and these are not tasks we can hand off to people without either running into privacy issues, funding issues, or trusting issues. Volunteers and/or paid workers do not help us alleviate the workload if we ourselves have to manage them. We've given 5 to 6 years of our life to this app, and prioritized the app during all this time. We missed countless moments with loved ones because I was too busy managing, developing and supporting this app. Now we wish to refocus our time to our family, friends and myself, not elongate it by having to manage people and in the end still take care of a lot myself because volunteers and paid workers cannot handle all the workload.
Why not sell the app or transfer it?
It's been brought up a few times yesterday but in the heat of the moment and dealing with the onslaught of users with questions I hadn't had the time to fully formulate longer explanations.
I have extensively considered either selling the company or transferring the data to another team, but it all comes with its own set of issues. For a company to be bought, they typically tend to need to make profit, or appear like they could in the future, and right now Patreon and Simply Plus, and TPA have always made us break even or slightly above break even. Whatever extra money that is left over at the end of the month, goes to license fees for software, taxes, bookkeeping fees, etc, and also ensuring we have a small buffer in case of sudden bigger expenses. The only way I see SP being able to make money is either; Force subscriptions for features (paywalling), adding extensive ads (Privacy concerns) or processing/managing/selling data to advertisers(big no-no). None of these options is anything I ever want to put onto the users, and any company buying us would do one of those three things. In the world of capitalism, there's virtually no one out there I could trust selling to to not do this, even if I make it a requirement of the sale, companies find loopholes all the time.
The option of "just transfer it to another team" is another "easy solution to a complex problem", any team we would transfer it to would need to; Have the money to take on this project and self-fund it in the worst cases, especially at the start, have the time to manage everything I've been managing, have the technical knowhow of how to make apps, APIs, manage servers, manage accounts and more. That team would have virtually no knowledge of any of the codebase or how any of it works and I would need to extensively help them out in the first few months to get them up and running, which I do not have time for as that would be a multitude of more work than I currently have. I would also need to be able to trust that team with the user data in the first place. Except for established developers in this space, I wouldn't trust anyone with that. However, even if we were to magically find a team that is willing to take it on in the long term or a magical company wanting to buy this, and we can trust them, and they have the capabilities and funding to do so, we're located in the EU and transferring user-data isn't just the click of a button. We would need to get our lawyers to handle the transfer agreement, do due diligence to ensure we're not breaking laws, give users notification of this, get their approval, orchestrate the entire transfer, coordinate with the other team, and a plenitude of a lot more. This would be an expensive and lengthy process that I unfortunately do not see feasible with my available time.
Why was this decision made a few months after Simply Plus was released?
Simply plus was announced in august of 2024, it took long to implement it and find a way to offer the subscriptions that works for us and the users the best. Simply plus was then released end of last year because the cost of the servers and services we use kept growing and I couldn't keep putting it off, so we finished the subscription despite already considering this. Yes, it's bad timing but we wanted to try and keep the servers up until I've made a decision and had time to think this all through.