You are shutting down?

[pdomenig]

So as far as I have understood you have canceled all pre-orders of further units, and as I understand there will be most likely no further units at all.

1. Does this mean there will be no further improvments on the software?

2. Will you shut down the online services?

[bmoney]

We ran into issues with the new unit on the funding front, and on the hardware front. Unfortunately the cost of many of the parts that we used on the last unit have tripled in price recently for some reason. I has become unmanageable for two people to maintain the current business. When we started this open source project we were counting on having many people helping us, something which never happened. We no longer have the funds to keep paying for this project out of our own pockets.

Updates to the software will be few if any in the future.

We are looking into options to keep the online services open. Currently the online services cost us quite a bit every month (~$60 - $80). We were thinking that we could setup some sort of auto pay system where the users that would like to see the web services continue could divy up the costs and pay for them themselves every month. We would have to work out the details on this. The other option is someone takes our source code and creates an application that runs on your local home network that the unit would connect to thus cutting out the internet costs all together.

Let us know your thoughts. We wish this product would have taken off more than it did.

Sorry for the bad news.

[ringeralle]

Shouldn't information as important as this be a lead item in your blog?

Regarding the ongoing web costs - I am sure you have enough device owners that a $10 - $15 annual subscription should be enough to keep the website operating.
If you are going to charge a fee, I would prefer that only paid accounts would be able to use the web functionality. This will encourage people to pay the fee.

Regarding untethering the Brewbit from your web service and allowing it to run locally on the owner's network - please find a way to make this happen. You have made a very nice device, but it kills me that it's going to become an expensive brick just because you didn't anticipate that owners might want to be untethered.

[frymd]

I have to agree. Basically, you sold everyone a product that we can no longer use. Offer a paid service so that we can at least continue to use your product? Wasn’t sure why you didn’t have a booth at NHC in San Diego this year? The Brew Bug was there and selling their wares like crazy!!

[pdomenig]

For me a paid suscription is no solution since I need further temperature control devices. Since I will not be able to get these, I basically have no interest in a paid or local solution. But in my personal opinion you owe your supporters this local solution!

Rather then investing in a paid suscription I would invest the money in a device with a feature...

Well, I really need to stop investing in such stupid startups.

[derfburg]

Guess I can still use it on my cooler. Was integrated into my RIMS, now need to figure out a work around.

[mixylplik3]

I have zero interest in paying for anything that is essentially weak life support with a questionable future, at best. I think a self-hosted solution is ideal, especially if it's something that could be configured to support multiple Brewbits. I know 2 other people with them and it would be convenient if one of us could host all 3 on their own server.

[mike2]

$60-$80 per month? Have you considered moving to shared hosting such as DreamHost and using a free CDN such as CloudFlare? This would only cost around $10 per month and should have ample power to serve the legacy devices.

P.S. What language are the online services written in?

[aaron_ouellette]

What exactly is the level of effort to either allow personal websites to function as the webserver, or for a stand alone app to perform these duties?

Is the web service part of the opensource code, if not how difficult would it be to make it so?
Thanks,
AO

[ckinder]

Sorry to hear about this, I love my brewbit and use it for every fermentation. I'd be in favor of a local solution over the subscription, though I don't know how involved the install/config is to accomplish that.

[truckmann]

Sad day. I hope a solution is found to keep this device going. I also would prefer a local solution. I use mine to constantly monitor temps in the brewery and fermentation chamber and I also have it hooked up to control my HLT.

[emdubeu]

Has anyone else's MT stopped connecting to the Brewbit servers?

By the way, I would pay $10 - $15 for an annual subscription to keep this going.

[cricrivolant]

Sad news
I thinks the permanent solution is the local network. That guaranty that in the future every user will be using all the feature of there Brewbit. Im ok also to paid a fee per month but on day that service can close and at that point we will not be able to sent temp profile to the unit.

Cheers

Christian

[homebrewfinds]

This is a sad day. Back in 2013 you said "Your data will always be available to you from BrewBit.com free of charge". I understand that things change. I would encourage you to find a solution that doesn't leave current owners stranded or require them to pay in perpetuity for something they have already paid for. The BrewBit is awesome... I wish you could keep it going.

[truckmann]

It seems a lot of these kinds of great projects don't go well as a lone item. Take the BCS-460, which I think on it's own almost fizzled out. Now that Brewers Hardware owns it, it seems to be saved from certain death. It's just hard to make it with only one product. The very best solution for this controller would be to partner with or sell out to a company that isn't dependent on just this one product. The trick is finding a company that is willing and able to do it.

[truckmann]

It might be worth a try to contact some places like Brewers Hardware, Brew Hardware or even Electric Brewing Supply to see if any of them could help continue the project or would be interested in purchasing it.

[SLOBrewer]

I understand that you can't continue to pour endless money and effort into this project if it's not taking off but I'd like to request that you put together a graceful wrap up plan. The 1.6.0 release added some awesome features but it also introduced a spurious hardware reset that means that temperature ramps are almost useless. Fix that issue and come up with a solution to ensure we can keep running our units and I think you'll be making the right choice.

[hebnern]

Thanks to everyone for weighing in. We were planning to do a more formal announcement, but we haven't finalized the wrap up plan. All we know right now is we are dumping a bunch of money into this project and don't currently have a path to profitability that will work with our currently available resources (time and money). The current hardware design is no longer manufacturable, so a new run of units is not possible. A redesign of some components (mainly WiFi) would be necessary, but we don't have the time or money to do that.

For supporting existing units, I think I can get our monthly costs down to something more reasonable by consolidating the website and forum which are currently running on separate servers. That would still leave us paying probably $200-300/yr. Not a crazy sum, but we would be interested in seeing if people would be willing to chip in for this. So far it seems people are split on this issue. The local server option is technically possible but we don't really have the time to get that into a state where it would be easy for people to setup. All of the code has been open source since day one, so if anyone wants to help out with that, please feel free.

[truckmann]

I would be willing to pay a small yearly fee for a while to help out in the short term, but ideally I'd like to see and easy local server option if something better can't be found. I'd love to help if I could with this, but I have no programming skills.

[homebrewfinds]

Over time the pool of people willing to do this is going to dwindle. Some people won't be willing to pitch in at all, so the starting group isn't going to be everyone. Over time people will switch equipment, stop or pause their homebrewing and unsubscribe because their model t has broken. I'm guessing a subscription model is a solution, but only for a set amount of time.