Permanent.Cloud

You can now order an AppInstallation for any app on permanent.cloud. Try it out with Etherpad.

Gaby joins to help lead Customer Experience Design. We've got a team!

We head to Buenos Aires, Argentina for a month to get started together.

I visited Helsinki, Finland to speak at the MyData 2018 conference about ActivityPub: a federated social networking protocol (that has implementations you can run on Permanent.Cloud).

I tried pitching to anyone who would listen, and showed off the new permanent.cloud App Store to a diverse audience from many backgrounds.

I shipped the first version of permanent.cloud/apps where you can browse the best open source cloud apps and learn about them.

I could pull this up on my phone at a conference to show off the product, link people to it, and use it to talk about all the apps that Permanent.Cloud can support (and link to each app page too).

I also used the open source Matomo to power web analytics so I can see which apps are getting those most attention, bounce rates, referrers, etc.

Early 2018 I still had some trips and conferences and contracts taking up a lot of time, and while I was starting to test the idea with all kinds of people and learn how to talk about it with different audiences, I wasn't fully prioritizing getting meaningful progress done on Permanent. This is when I first shipped the permanent.company website and started building the Permanent App Store

After plenty of time traveling around and thinking about what to do next, then proving I could at least run a freelancing business, I decided on mission I would be excited to work on for years to come:

Problems I'm fed up with:

• Many of the SaaS products I use don't last very long. They get bought, redesigned, shut down, hacked, or the price gets jacked up. They're impermanent. I don't want to waste time learning services that won't be around for long.
• The ones that do stick around are often either selling my data or sharing it with government agencies in ways that creep me out
• "Self-hosting" free tools I trust in a way that is scalable and fault-tolerant is time consuming, complicated, and expensive.
• When I make a cool new web app and don't want to build a SaaS business around it, it kind of just goes on GitHub and maybe some developers figure out how to use it. Where is my distribution channel for open source web apps?

Mission:

• Make Free software easier to use than proprietary SaaS.
• Help project leaders power up their projects using open tools that will be around forever and are maintained by a community and not just one company
• Help Free software makers find people that love to use their apps

Vision: free computing for everyone on earth