roadmap: march update
welcome to our first monthly roadmap update! we've announced a lot of products over the past couple months, and we figured it's time to start being transparent about where things stand and what we're prioritizing. we'll be posting one of these every month going forward, so you always know what we're working on.
the priority list
we're a small team, and we'd rather ship great products than rush out mediocre ones. so instead of building everything at once, we're going one at a time. here's the order:
1. oxygen
oxygen is our top priority. we've been heads-down on the backend architecture for a while now, and we're really happy with where it's going.
there's a lot of moving parts here. audio fingerprinting & recognition, global storage, fast delivery, and a player that actually feels good to use. we want oxygen to feel like the music player you've always wanted but nobody bothered to build, and that takes a lot of work.
our current focus with oxygen is music recognition. we’ve been hard at work building out infrastructure to be able to efficiently match uploaded audio to music metadata. to do this, we’re using the musicbrainz & acoustid datasets via custom built tools to make them work for us at scale. in fact, as i’m writing this, i’m working on indexing the acoustid dataset in the background.
oxygen will be likely the first product that we drop, and we hope to open up a waitlist in the coming weeks along with a new landing page.
for developers:
it’s also likely that we’ll begin opening up access to our music recognition service for developers to utilize in their own products around that time. naming & pricing is not final for this, but we’re currently running with oxygen id as the name & aiming for pricing around $2.50/1000 requests.
it won’t have any sales or enterprise fluff. many of the existing solutions either are extremely expensive, require you to contact sales to even get a price, or in some cases aren’t accessible to smaller companies or users at all. we’re hoping to be able to be able to solve all those problems and give a straightforward pricing page where you can pay and use it right away. no annoying sales.
we’re also going to open up the ability to submit new fingerprints to our API with metadata along with them so we can both grow our dataset & contribute back to our upstream datasets. we’ll also make our dataset publicly available if you’re interested in self hosting it on your own infrastructure. all the software we use to build & run it is or will be open-source on our github.
2. email
email is up next. if you were a helium.email customer, you already know we have something in the works. we've had a lot of interest from people who are tired of email hosting that feels like it was designed in 2003, and we're excited to deliver something better.
we previously had announced a date of late March for our authentication service, and a date of late May for migrating to our new infrastructure. currently, we’ve onboarded 2 existing customers onto our new authentication service and are still making updates to it currently to make sure we’re happy with it.
3. cdn
cdn is third in line. we've already done a ton of design work on the multi-network architecture, edge functions, and the security layer. once oxygen and email are out the door, cdn will move fast.
the goal is simple: keep your origin invisible, your content fast, and give you intelligence at the edge. we'll have a lot more to share on this one in the coming months.
4. img
img rounds out our initial product lineup. on-the-fly image transformations, variant support, global storage, all without the ridiculous pricing you're used to from other providers.
we want img to be the kind of thing you drop into your project and forget about. it just works, it's fast, and it doesn't cost you a fortune to resize a jpg.
what about timelines?
we're not going to give you hard dates we can't keep. what we will do is be loud about our progress. when something is close, you'll know. when something is delayed, we'll tell you why. that's the whole point of these updates.
the best way to stay in the loop between updates is to follow us on twitter @usezephyra or join our discord. in the discord, we have a live git feed & post status updates there. we’d also love to hear what you think and what you’d like to hear about in the next update.
see you in april
that's it for this month. we'll be back with another update next month, expect more detail on oxygen progress and where email migration stands. thanks for following along.