Sandstorm Oasis

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

~ the obituary ~

Sandstorm was a personal server you did not have to be a sysadmin to run. You picked an app from a market and clicked once, and it appeared on your own machine inside its own sandbox, unable to touch anything else without being handed permission. Each running instance was called a grain. Oasis was the version for people who did not want a machine at all: Sandstorm would host the grains for you. It opened as a public beta on 31 August 2015, free at first, with the name picked by a Twitter poll, and came out of beta in November 2016 at six dollars a month.

The company behind it, Sandstorm Development Group, had raised a $1.3 million seed round in January 2015 on the back of a crowdfunding campaign. That money ran out faster than the idea did. By 2017 the company had mostly wound down and the team went looking for work, with most of them landing at Cloudflare. The open source project kept going on volunteers. Oasis kept going on one person.

On 15 September 2019 Kenton Varda posted the shutdown notice, and it is one of the more candid documents in this corpus. Oasis took in roughly $1,800 a month and cost around $1,400 to run. Almost all the packaged apps dated from 2015 or 2016 and were stuck on old versions. Pages loaded slowly. He wrote that self-hosting Sandstorm on a server of equivalent price would give you a much better experience, and then wrote the line that actually ended it: he no longer felt good about charging money for the product. Paid hosting would begin winding down on 31 December 2019, no new monthly payments after 1 January 2020, and grain owners had until 30 June 2020 to pull their data out.

Oasis asked a narrow question of people like me: will you pay a small American company six dollars a month to run software you are perfectly capable of running yourself? For an engineer the answer usually comes out no, and that is not a criticism of the product. The founder arrived at the same answer in public, in his own goodbye post. A company rarely tells you its paid product is worse than the free alternative.

~ the case file ~

~ one person on call ~

The shutdown post describes an operational life that nobody designs on purpose. Varda was running Oasis alone and was on call for it around the clock, years after the business that was supposed to support it had stopped existing. Hosting other people's data is the kind of promise that does not go quiet when the funding does. Every incident was his, every night.

He had already built the things he is better known for by then. Cap'n Proto came out of Sandstorm's own need for fast serialization, and after the company folded he went to Cloudflare, where he designed the runtime that became Cloudflare Workers. The sandboxing ideas Sandstorm was built on did not die with Oasis so much as change employers.

~ the arithmetic ~

Two hundred subscribers at six dollars gets you roughly $1,800 a month against $1,400 in costs. That is a $400 monthly margin before anyone is paid for their time, which means the service was not losing money and still could not be justified. Varda worried in print that some of those subscribers had signed up by mistake and never noticed the charge, and that others did not understand the company behind their hosting had effectively stopped existing.

~ what stayed up ~

Only Oasis died. Sandcats.io, the free dynamic DNS and certificate service for self-hosted installs, kept answering, and so did the app market. Anyone who moved their grains to their own box carried on with no loss of function, which was the whole point of the architecture and the reason the shutdown reads calm rather than desperate.

The open source project outlived its own startup by a wide margin and moved to sandstorm.org in January 2024. The old sandstorm.io still serves every blog post from the company years with a banner across the top explaining that the site is historical.

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