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Such a shame, they looked promising. I even managed to get a nice username...
I assume Notion is buying out competition because of Skiff's pages feature.
Most retarded acquisition of 2024
That's very sad news. Skiff looked very good.
Was on my way to fully migrate from proton to skiff. Really liked their neat, no-bullshit suit. What a pity.
I liked the typing experience of Skiff Pages. What products out there are similar?
OFC it's Notion
There are plenty like Evernote, ClickUp, Asana, etc
Perhaps with so many customers indicating they'll miss the product, Notion/Skiff will spin it off or sell it with its customer base.
True, but they are not end-to-end encrypted. Skiff was supposed to be positioning itself as the privacy replacement for Google Workspace (and its competitors), and there certainly was overlap with Notion and many other providers of course. Keyword: privacy.
So if you cared about Skiff because of its privacy features, then your alternatives are indeed very few and far between. That's one of the reasons this is a shame that it is happening. But if you don't care about privacy features then you have several good options.
EDIT: BTW, if Proton were to offer a pages-like service as part of their own growing portfolio of services, then Proton would be a good complete end-to-end encrypted alternative to Skiff. But right now Proton has Mail, Calendar, Drive, VPN, and Pass, all pretty good services by themselves. It's really just missing a "pages" kind of functionality and it will more than replace what Skiff had. Skiff was competing with both Proton on the privacy side of the market and trying to compete with Google on the Workspace side of the market. Too bad it's over. They seemed to have a bright future ahead. They never quite reached full maturity and were missing important features on both sides of the market, but yet they still found a nice balance.
Would be nice, but again, I think this is a Sequoia decision, and as the funding behind both Notion and Skiff, I think they decided they are doubling down on Notion since it already has a huge enterprise market. I think they saw the margins on Skiff's userbase, and I believe they decided there wasn't enough money in it long term (almost no way to monetize users through typical means in an end-to-end encrypted userbase!), so they kept the IP of the backend (which was never open sourced) and then moved the talent that built it over to Notion to double down on the enterprise market, where there is a lot more money to be made. They are two very different markets, and I believe Sequoia has abandoned the privacy-oriented consumer market in favor of the big enterprise market. This is my guess only based on available facts. Perhaps I'm wrong, and perhaps they will reverse course somewhat in a month or two. But I doubt it.
Quick follow up - I'm finally all moved out of Skiff, and I contacted them about a refund since they mention it on their site... and... silence so far.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I'm not expecting anything. But it highlights how disappointing this whole thing is.
They may be overwhelmed by refund requests, so I'll give them some more time before I give up hope and just close the book on them. Won't be worth the trouble to pursue it, and they've already cost me a lot of time, I don't want to waste any more.
If they don't answer, I would just file a chargeback through your back/card company. I don't think they would be overwhelmed by refund requests as I doubt they had that many paying customers in the first place.
For an E2EE alternative to Skiff Pages, I recommend Standard Notes.
Chargebacks are really a last resort when disputes can't be resolved in a reasonable manner, but yes, if they don't ever respond, it's an option to consider. We'll see. My time is valuable to me, and even dealing with a dispute in that way can end up wasting more time than it's worth. That's just my opinion, YMMV. Someone else may feel outraged about it and want to demand to be made whole, and that's fine if they want to spend the energy and time on it, that's their life. This is not an outrage to me, they just failed as a business, it's disappointing, but it happens, and their lawyers might easily argue about how generous they were to give everyone 6 months to move out.
Also, since I received partial service from them, I imagine they'd only give me a partial refund, if they ever get back to me. Doing a full chargeback in that case could end up causing me more headaches in the future if they decide push back and do a collection on me, which would be unlikely, but that would trigger more hassle and time that is not worth it IMO. So I'm not gonna stress about it right now. I've already wasted enough time moving out of Skiff.
Mainly I'm just disappointed. Sometimes sh!t happens, life goes on.
Indeed, Standard Notes is very good. However, it currently does not have the collaboration capability that Skiff had. In fact, Skiff was unique in the privacy arena AFAIK with their real-time collaboration features with Skiff Pages. But yes, if you are looking for a solo encrypted notes experience that really cares about privacy, Standard Notes should be at the top of your list.
Please remind me: Does Pages support exporting to PDF? I get markdown files when I export.
Edit: Apparently PDF is supported. I just haven't found it yet.
IP?
This 👆 and also the if ya can't beat em, buy em mentality. There's a tumblog that meme-ifies these because it's literally the same story every time.
(googles to find it)
Oh look, they documented it when it happened: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/post/742029399962091520/skiff
I remember when Motorola finally crumbled.. It was a feeding frenzy, all the companies that wanted to buy Motorola, take the IP they wanted, and then sold what was left to the next group..
"Motorola" changed hands 5 (+?) times in a year..
Same here. In my case it was a pretty quick migration although slightly inconvenienced by the existing accounts on skiff's email aliases which I actually have manually change it to a new email addresses. As an alternative, I have pretty much now used SimpleLogin for email aliases which was easy to adapt.
Moved my domain to a new email hosting provider and downloaded the inbox history from skiff.
Do you pay for SimpleLogin or just use their free plan?
I only use the free plan
They provide great service, I deleted my account when they were acquired by notion, it's a sad story
lol, so the addresses will stop working too? Recommend a normal secure email) maybe a paid one (but not very expensive), maybe Tutanota
Proton
not safe, blocked in Russia, letters from Yandex and mail ru services do not reach it
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/tools/#self-hosted-solutions
Otherwise, from the top of my head, maybe some non-profit organisations like disroot or others listed here(Keep in mind it's a little outdated and may not be perfect for everyone).
Or, you just get some cheap plan which allows normal mail protocols like purelymail or mxroute and either use them directly with a custom domain or get a addy.io (or simplelogin, idk how good they are) plan to put "in front of your mailbox".