Why Aster won't become the next Skiff

If you’re reading this blog post, there’s a very likely chance that you have lost an inbox before.

Maybe it was Skiff, or maybe just something older. Either way, you remember the exact feeling: an email coming into your inbox in the middle of a normal week, telling you that the service you had brought everything into, the address you had handed it to, and the keys you had exchanged, all had an expiration date a few months away. They give you a few months to pack up your entire life and move it somewhere else. Most of the people who built it had already moved on.

This is not an experience anyone wants to repeat. We are fully aware. It is the experience that has gotten a lot of you looking into Aster in the first place. This is why we want to directly address it. The question hanging over every single privacy email service right now is the same one: how do you know we will still be here?

We could just say “trust us,” but “trust us” is what every single email service says right up until the day it disappears. Instead, we want to directly walk you through the actual reasons we believe Aster is built differently. The things that ended Skiff for its users were not bad luck. They came from a handful of specific choices from their founders. This is why we’ve made different ones on purpose.

There’s nobody we have to sell to

Skiff raised around $14 million from venture capital, and there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that. It’s just how the startup world works. Whenever a company takes that amount of money, then they quietly agree on how their story ends. They either grow into something massive by themselves, or they sell the company.

Email is a very hard business to win outright. For most privacy startups, the realistic ending is getting bought out. Whenever an encrypted email service gets bought out, the product almost always goes down the drain, and the team moves on to whatever comes next.

Aster is a completely bootstrapped startup. There are zero investors and no board that’s hungry for a massive payout. There is no clock that is ticking towards a sale of our company, but on the other hand, that still does not make us bulletproof. A lot of bootstrap companies fail too, and we are not going to act like they don’t. It takes away the pressure that turns a healthy product into something worth selling off.

We do not owe anyone an exit. The only thing that we owe is the service that is worth paying for, run by people who actually use it personally.

What this means for you: Nobody is forcing Aster towards a sale in the future because there is nobody we are obligated to sell to.

If we ever disappeared, the software wouldn’t

Our front end is open source under AGPL v3, and you are able to go in and audit every single line of github.com/Aster-Privacy.

We chose AGPL specifically because it is one of the strongest open-source licenses that exist. Anybody who runs the code as a service has to share their own source code too, which means the software cannot get locked away later. If Aster the company ever went under, the code would not go under with it. It would already be out in the open and licensed for anyone to run, fork, or keep alive. This means some other team somewhere could start it back up tomorrow.

What this means for you: Even in the worst case, the thing you rely on every day doesn’t disappear just because we do.

Your keys were never ours to hold onto

This is the one that is most important to us, and it’s the part that most providers quietly get wrong.

Aster uses standard OpenPGP with RSA-4096 keys, and “standard” is the word that matters in this case. This is not a clever protocol that we invented, and it is not a format that only works inside our ecosystem. Your keys will work with any other client, such as GPG, Thunderbird, etc.

We also support automatic public key discovery through WKD and key servers, so the rest of the PGP world can find and write to your PGP address securely without you having to do anything technical.

Here is why this is the main part of the entire question. The shutdown nightmare is not just that the service goes away. It’s that, for a lot of email providers, your keys and your identity are welded and locked into that one service’s ecosystem. Leaving that service does not just cost you your email. It costs you your entire digital life.

You need to start over from scratch in the middle of a panic, on a deadline that a corporation picked for you. This is why we have built the opposite of that: Aster uses plain OpenPGP, so you can always walk out tomorrow and take your keys with you to any other PGP client. This is a deliberately low-fence service. A service that believes it’s worth using does not need to trap you in their ecosystem to keep you around. The single fact that you can leave easily is exactly why you do not have to worry about being stranded with us.

What this means for you: You are never locked into Aster’s ecosystem, and if we ever stop earning your trust, you can leave and leave nothing behind.

What we’ll actually promise

We are not going to sit here and tell you that Aster will be here for the rest of existence. Any company can fail and collapse, and anyone who promises otherwise is probably selling you something.

What we will promise is this: the specific way that Skiff ended, bought, and sunset, with users scrambling for alternatives, runs straight through choices that we choose to not make. There are no investors steering us toward a sale in the future, and there is code that can outlive the company. Your keys were never ours to hold on to in the first place.

That is the kind of trust we think is worth anything, not the kind that asks you to take our word for it, but the kind that’s built so you do not have to.

If you have been waiting for a private inbox you can settle into without watching the door, please feel free to come over. Bring your keys, try the app out, or just talk to us in the open.

We think you’ll stay because you want to, not because you’re stuck. If the day ever comes where you do not want to anymore, we built Aster so walking away cost you nothing. This is the version of trust we wanted to earn.

Welcome to Aster.