Zenbe Personal is Closing- Shareflow and Zenbe Mail Still Going Strong
January 21st, 2010 by Peter Stern · comments · http://blog.zenbe.com/asquvZenbe Personal, our green-bordered free email service, will be shutting down at the end of February.
When we launched Zenbe Personal in the early Summer of ‘08, it embodied some of our ideas on the future of messaging: simple email aggregation, tagging, files view, zenpages, and quite a few other innovations. Zenbe Personal received respectable attention, and people signed up faster than we ever expected.
Unfortunately, Fall of ‘08 derailed our plans to turn Zenbe Personal into a sustainable business, and we had to pursue other opportunities.
Despite no updates, no customer support, and no new signups for well over a year, Zenbe Personal still has quite a following. We are sad to shut it down, but Zenbe Personal is becoming increasingly more difficult and expensive to maintain.
Zenbe Personal customers have been notified, given an extensive migration plan instructing them on how to download their personal data, and have plenty of time to move off of Zenbe Personal.
Shareflow and Zenbe Mail (our un-free, blue-bordered offering) are unaffected.
In fact, we will be expanding Shareflow, with more features, more storage, and a simpler signup, all for free.
“More Shareflow for free? Wait a second”, you might ask. “If you are shutting down Zenbe Personal because you can’t pay for those hard drives, what is up with Shareflow?”
Fair question.
Zenbe Personal was designed in 2007, with different goals and implemented on a different platform than Shareflow. Shareflow is built on cloud infrastructures that were not a practical reality in 2007. Running Zenbe Personal for the few tens of thousands of users still using it is expensive. Shareflow (and, for that matter, Zenbe Mail) costs are lower, and extra capacity costs us pennies at a time.
With Shareflow, enough customers pay for us to continue expanding the free service.
More here:
http://blog.zenbe.com/personal-shutdown/
If Zenbe Personal was so much more expensive to maintain, why wouldn’t you have given us free Zenbe Mail accounts a year ago? That is not smart business planning on your part Zenbe folks.
I mean honestly…. it was cheaper to maintain the paid mail but more expensive to maintain the free mail? What are you guys smoking?
Nice business plan
#1 Create a quality free email service and milk all the hype that comes with it.
#2 Start charging for a pro version with added feature.
#3 Screw over the users still using the free version by closing it.
Good job i just yesterday completed the moving of my mail and associated accounts to my gmail account. After using both for extended periods of time gmail is still better.
I wouldn’t mind paying for the service if a couple of things happened.
First and foremost the forums should be put back online and communication should be restored.
I like and many would like. (In order of priority)
- Per 10 year licenses that state the price and cost of zenbe will not change. And if it does a prorated discount for people that paid.
- More than 30-45 days “notice” .
- Better security and a audit & declaration of the sustainability of the service.
- No limit on how many email accounts i can add.
(And a declaration of that somewhere on the site.)
Some personal feature requests i would like to see.
( In order of priority )
- OpenID and Vidoop image shield support. (or something comparable)
- Support for email alerts within the desktop app.
- An apology from zenbe to its users for all the drama that’s been going on.
Some of the hateful remarks toward zenbe is something we all don’t need to see not being responded to or disavowed.
Give me that and I would gladly pay the product fees that you request.
Empathetic regards,
@XDS
Potential users: please note that “Continue using your existing email addresses” on the features page does not mention that there is a limit. You are not made aware of the limit anywhere on the site (FAQs included) until you actually start adding external addresses.
For me, this was a dealbreaker when trying out Zenbe’s paid version of the service because I didn’t want to have to choose which accounts to leave out. The vast majority of my e-mail comes from 2 accounts, but I have several others that get maybe one or two messages a month. The whole point of an e-mail aggregator is to not have to remember to log into other accounts to see if something came in within the last month.
Just a heads-up before you sign up. (I’ve alerted Zenbe staff to the fact that limit isn’t described anywhere on the site a couple of times in the past, and nothing seems to have been added to the descriptions.)
Nice products, but horrible service and support. Getting a tech support or customer support person to answer an email is like winning the lottery.
Recently I was at an IT conference and someone brought up zenbe and the laughter stopped only when someone said, such a nice looking product that missed the mark for today’s Internet. Meaning you have to have top notch support to demonstrate that your product is the best. A good UI hooks but only for so long.
I might have been willing to pay for this service, but I’ve got to say I don’t trust it anymore. I was burned once
How do I know that zenbe won’t be out of business in a year and leave me stranded with an email address I can’t use? The business acumen you’ve demonstrated by alienating your beta-testers doesn’t give me a strong sense of confidence.
How do I know that your email service will not suddenly go up in price or that I will be forced to join a more expensive plan as you phase out your less expensive plans (as you did with your free email.)
I would love to see a response to these questions, but I’m not getting the sense that the zenbe folks are checking their blogs or their forums.
@Zenbe, After using your early adopters as thankless guinea pigs — I hope you fail miserably at your last ditch effort to turn your business into something someone wants. With all the hate and discontent you’ve created, I find that extremely unlikely.
I think that the problem is the spammers.
Spam can play an awfully big part of killing a good thing.
If that is the case then zenbe should work something out with its users and let us know what the hell the story is. Also 1 month is a ridiculous amount of time to give users notice. Even 90 days would have atleast taken the edge off.
You guys should also check out GoWeBTop by laszlo systems, they have a decent setup too.
WOW . I actually played around with GMX and after some tweaking and adding gadgets i’m pleased to say i’m VERY impressed.
Looks like zenbe has some competition !
[...] mange føler de er behandlet på av zenbe.com. Dette komme tydelig frem i alle kommentarene i blogg posten som annonserer nedleggelsen av tjenesten. Det virker som om Zenbe har gjort mye feil og lite rett i de to-tre årene de har vært med [...]
Zenbe is a sinking ship with no integrity. The folks at Zenbe are simply playing this whole thing out in the most passive aggressive way towards their beta-group.
Listen up, guys- Communication is critical. Up-front disclosure, open lines of communication and relevant updates which allow a respectable time to act upon are CRITICAL.
The way everything is handled from Zenbe’s ended (regardless of their intentions or not) has caused me extreme distrust and lack of respect.
Just like E.K. Foley says- how do I know that in a year from now Zenbe won’t try to extort a higher rate from me or else threaten to close my account anyways?
Understandable that you can’t continue to have sign-ups for new free accounts, but at least have some respect for the folks who are already here.
Oh well. It was ok while it lasted. So long and ciao.