Mitro

» see mitro.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Mitro was a browser extension that stored your logins and, more usefully, let you hand a password to a colleague or a contractor without the password ever leaving your machine in readable form. The encryption happened client side, so the company could not read what it was holding. In 2012 that pitch was enough for $1.2 million in seed money from Google Ventures and Matrix Partners, with three engineers behind it and an extension in the Chrome store.

On 31 July 2014 Twitter hired the team and put them on geo work in New York. The deal gets described as an acquihire and that is accurate, but what happened next was not the usual thing. Instead of a sunset notice they published the client and the server under the GPL the same day, with the EFF advising on the handover, and announced that the hosted service would stay up while someone picked up the project.

Nobody really did, and the three of them kept running it. For fourteen months a password service used by real people was maintained in the evenings by engineers with other jobs, paying for the hosting themselves. On 11 July 2015 they put a banner on the homepage and started the clock.

~ the dossier ~

~ two hundred dollars a month ~

The first version of the shutdown page is the one worth reading. It explains the reason without decorating it: "We have been maintaining Mitro in our spare time, using our own money. At this point, the cost and administrative burden has become too much. We do not have time to properly manage a service that people rely on for their security."

Then, at the bottom, an offer that no company would ever make and three individuals obviously would: if the closure was going to cause real hardship and you were willing to pay at least $200 a month to keep Mitro running, email Evan Jones directly, and it was possible they could extend it. A password manager put a price on its own survival and the price was two hundred dollars. The offer was gone by the final version of the page.

~ the date moved twice ~

The banner history is unusually legible because the Archive caught each revision. On 11 July 2015 at 23:51 UTC it reads "Mitro is shutting down August 31st", with a timeline attached: new accounts disabled 18 July, read-only 16 August, switched off 31 August, all data destroyed 13 September.

By the 2 September capture the same banner says 30 September. By the final version it says 6 October, with read-only moved back to 24 September and the data deletion pushed out to 31 October. That last one is the date that held.

Five weeks of slippage on a three-step shutdown says something plainer than incompetence: everybody doing the work had a day job at Twitter. Most products announce a closing date they can hit because somebody is paid to hit it. This one announced a date it was hoping for.

~ the distance ~

Mitro's entire life ran from 2012 to 2015 and it was a small American product for small American teams. I was already deep into a career by then and had my own arrangements for this problem, none of which involved a startup I had never heard of in New York. By the time the name reached me at all, it belonged to a GitHub repository.

The code outlived the company in the ordinary way. Passopolis picked up the open sourced codebase and ran an independent instance, and the final shutdown page points at it while being careful to say it is "using the Mitro code, but is not affiliated with us in any way." mitro.co times out today and its shutdown page, the one with the $200 offer on it, answers 503.

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