Bridglet

I was a contractor and assigned to work on a project involving a Fortune 500 company who had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement an entirely new marketing stack for one of their business units...which included a reporting platform that could serve as a central dashboarding tool across all of their vendors.

It was my job to setup the reporting platform, which meant setting up meetings with all of their different vendors and figuring out a way to get their data into the reporting platform. Ideally, I wanted all of the vendors to just provide CSV files to an SFTP that we could then sweep into the reporting platform.

I was shocked to find out that the client's own IT department wasn't keen on the idea! They said that they hated setup FTP's because they had to do it on Azure which meant jumping through a bunch of hoops to setup and a monthly $300 bill for the privilege.

My experience with SFTP goes way back to the days when SFTP was the only way to update your website. I was shocked that Azure was charging so much for a service that came with every virtual server provider of the early 2000's.

So I decided to bring back inexpensive SFTP. I knew that erlang likely had it's own SFTP library (it does), and that I could likely set something up using a elixir pretty quickly that ran on a virtual server.

I was able to setup the SFTP pretty quickly, but what was really exciting to me was I realized I could use elixir's phoenix library to put a web-UI on top of the file directory!

After using it with my client, I decided that this needed to be it's own product. We were using it to send files back and forth and it just made everything so simple. We didn't have to worry about granting access to private repo's or code files getting stripped by overzealous email filters.

So I'm now releasing Bridglet! In order to get some early users to provide feedback, I'm doing a lifetime deal for $59. You can sign up at bridglet.com/lifetime. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!