Move to Trash

We are going to turn off Ship at the end of June, three months from now. Starting today, all subscriptions will go to $0, so everyone can use Ship for free for the remainder of the time. If you have a monthly subscription, you won't be billed again. If you have a yearly subscription, we will send you a refund.

Why?

Put simply, we don't make enough money from Ship to justify developing or supporting the product any more.

As much as we would like to just make Ship free or open source for people to keep using into the future, the reality is that it only continues to be useful as long as Nick and I continue to put a lot of effort into it. As GitHub introduces new features and APIs, and changes or breaks existing ones, it's necessary for us to stay on top of those developments or else the information shown in Ship will be incomplete or incorrect. I'm not trying to blame GitHub at all, but it's a fact that GitHub is a subscription service with a mandate from its users to evolve, and if Ship doesn't evolve along with it, it won't be useful for long.

Therefore, we feel it is best to schedule an orderly shutdown while things still work rather than wait for the inevitable change that breaks the product in the future when we probably won't have time to fix it.

What About The Data?

Github.com has always been the original source of truth for all data in Ship, so all of your data continues to live there. We also cache some data on our servers. After we stop accepting incoming server connections from Ship clients on July 1, 2018, we are going to delete all of the cached data we have, including all backups. Just before we delete all the data, we will remove all GitHub webhooks we've installed and revoke all of the OAuth tokens we have stored.¹ We will complete this task before August 1, 2018.

We have always kept your data private and that's not going to change. We're not going to sell, give, transfer, copy or do anything else with the data we have besides delete it.

The only exception to this is attachments on shipusercontent.com. Due to the fact that GitHub doesn't offer an attachment hosting API, we've had to host these ourselves. We are going to keep these online until July 1, 2028 to prevent data loss and broken links, but you can use our migration tool if you'd like to move them.

You also likely have caches of your data locally on your computers at ~/Library/RealArtists. You will want to hang on to this data if you plan to migrate your attachments, but otherwise you can delete it.

If you have a subscription to Ship and we have your payment information on file with Chargebee, we will be deleting all of the payment information from Chargebee by August 1, 2018 as well (and probably sooner, since we're making everything free starting now). We will keep the subscription information (payment amounts and physical addresses) until we can finish our taxes for 2018, and then we will delete that too.

What's Next

I'm going to try to get a job somewhere.

Nick is going to take some time off to complete some unfinished electronics projects, and hopefully start some new ones.

Thanks

If you were a subscriber to Ship, or if you wrote in to us with encouragement or suggestions, thank you! Even though canceling the software is bittersweet, I will have fond memories of working on this project because of all of the kind words that people sent in to us.