roadmap: june update
we're back! i know, i know, we said we'd do these monthly, but it's been a very busy couple of months. let me bring you up to speed on what's been going on and why everything is so delayed.
oxygen
we said that oxygen would be the first project we release, but unfortunately we had to pause for a bit due to a restriction from musicbrainz. let me explain how our systems work.
oxygen heavily depends on a few custom-built services and tools: mbforge, chromaforge, and chromakopia. due to our expected usage, we can't hit musicbrainz directly without running into rate limits, so instead we host our own copy of the musicbrainz data. that's what mbforge is for. it builds a SQLite database from a musicbrainz database dump. chromaforge does the same thing for acoustid, giving us our own copy of the fingerprint data. together these let us handle a large volume of requests without breaking the bank.
the issue comes when we need to update that data. chromakopia is the service that ties it all together, an acoustid and musicbrainz server that automatically handles incremental updates to both databases and returns data from each. the catch is that incremental updates rely on musicbrainz's Live Data Feed, and as a commercial product, we initially weren't permitted to use it. without it, chromakopia was stuck, and without chromakopia we couldn't fully build out oxygen the way we wanted to.
as of June 11th, 2026, zephyra has become a sponsor of the metabrainz foundation. sponsorship is the path commercial users take to get access to the Live Data Feed, which unblocks development of chromakopia. we hope to ramp things up and start accepting waitlist registrations soon.
so if we weren't working on oxygen, what were we doing!? well, email. over the last month we've been building haitatsu, a fully custom, simple email server designed to fit in a single executable with no external dependencies. through internal testing we've gotten it to a really solid point, solid enough that we're comfortable building email's webmail on top of it.
zephyra email is currently in private alpha, with a few select users given access so we can make sure everything works before we open the doors. it's still in development, and we're planning a launch within the next 3 months. once we have a full flow ready for custom domains, we'll begin emailing existing helium.email users and start migrating accounts over.
cdn & img
cdn and img are paused for the foreseeable future until we can secure additional funding. email and oxygen are our main priorities right now. this may change as we adapt our workflow, but for now we're not in a position to build these out.
what's next?
we're about to ramp up development on oxygen and hope to get it into a good state soon. we're aiming to open waitlists for both oxygen and email within the next few weeks as things pick up. as always, we don't want to commit to specific dates given how busy things have been, but we'll let you know the moment we're ready.
the best way to stay in the loop between updates is to follow us on twitter @usezephyra or join our discord, where we have a live git feed and post status updates. thanks for following along, see you in the next one.