Sameroom

» see sameroom.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The company was called LeChat, and before Sameroom it had spent two years on a product called Kato, which was team chat for people who lived in GitHub. Kato launched in late 2013 and got written up by TechCrunch in August 2014. Then it lost, and by October 2015 it was switched off. The interesting part is what LeChat did in between, which was to stop competing with Slack and HipChat and start selling the wiring between them.

Sameroom appeared in March 2015 while Kato was still running, which means the pivot happened in public, with the old product's users watching. The mechanic was deliberately small. You created a Portal, which was just a URL on sameroom.io that looked like sameroom.io/98IX89, and you gave it to somebody at another company. They opened it and picked whichever chat service they already used. Choosing a channel finished the job, and the result was a Tube, in the company's vocabulary, relaying messages both ways in real time. No app to install, no webhooks to configure, nothing stored. Andrei Soroker put it to Hacker News in April 2015 in one line: definitely no apps, the goal is to be the plumbing that connects other apps.

It worked across Slack, HipChat, Skype, IRC, Campfire, Telegram, Gitter and Flowdock at launch, and more than twenty platforms by the time anyone bought it. Skype took a while, and the obstacle Soroker named was not technical but legal: figuring out the protocol was the easy half, keeping the result lawful was the other one.

~ the case file ~

~ six percent ~

8x8 signed on 5 January 2017 and closed the next day. The price was $3.1 million, which the press release did not mention and which only became public in a 10-K filed that May. The breakdown is the part worth reading: $2.4 million to the preferred shareholders and $0.2 million to the common shareholders, with another $0.5 million parked in escrow for two years against indemnity claims.

Preferred shares are investors. Common shares are founders and staff. On a $3.1 million exit the people who wrote the software took home about six percent of it, and the filing also discloses that 8x8 assigned the acquired technology a useful life of two years. Accounting is not a moral judgment, but it does commit a buyer to a sentence, and the sentence here was that the Sameroom codebase would be worth nothing by January 2019. Revenue from LeChat between the acquisition and the end of that financial year is recorded as immaterial.

~ five quiet years ~

8x8 put it to work properly. It went into the product line under the heading of team collaboration interoperability and was sold to investors as a pillar of the strategy. It also ran in two forms at once: the standalone paid portal at sameroom.io, and a free bundled feature inside 8x8's X Series for business customers.

Then it stopped being a story anyone told. Sameroom appears in 8x8's annual filings for 2017 and 2018 and then never again, which lines up exactly with that two-year amortization running out. From mid-2018 it ran for another five years without being mentioned to a single investor. The service was alive the whole time, relaying messages between companies that had no idea their bridge was a line item somebody had already written down to zero.

~ thirty-three days ~

The notice went out on 28 April 2023. New signups were disabled the same day, and on 31 May the relay stopped and the portal stopped answering. Standalone customers got prorated refunds within five business days; the X Series customers got nothing, because for them it had always been free.

8x8's stated reason is the clearest explanation of this category of death anyone has written down. It relied on third-party chat services continuing to operate in a way that let Sameroom function, and over time those services made API and other changes that made it infeasible to maintain. Usage declined, the notice adds, especially as chat services such as Slack provided similar functionality themselves. A product whose entire body is other people's interfaces dies when those people redecorate.

There is no farewell page. sameroom.io still answers today, and what it does is redirect you to 8x8's end-of-life notice, which has been the domain's only function since June 2023. Every old blog post, every write-up of how to connect Slack to Skype, funnels to the same obituary.

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