Skiff

» see skiff.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

encrypted-email startups showed up on hacker news every six months between 2015 and 2024. skiff was one of them. i did not try it. by then i had the gmail account i had had for years and the work calendar that sat on top of it, and that was not a thing i was going to migrate over a privacy thesis.

two stanford students, andrew milich and jason ginsberg, started skiff in 2020. the public launch landed in november 2021 with end-to-end encrypted email at the core. the pitch was a privacy-first stack you could actually use, with encrypted docs bolted on the same crypto layer. honestly, the demo was good. it looked like google docs without the part where google could read your document.

by late 2023 the user count was close to two million. on 9 february 2024 notion announced the acquihire. the founders and the team went over, the product got a six-month sunset window. users had until 9 august 2024 to migrate. email forwarding limped along until 9 february 2025 to ease the bounce, then that was also turned off.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

google docs, but with keys held client-side and a server that could not read what was on it. that was it. for the people who cared about that property, the demo did exactly what the demo said it would.

proton mail had the privacy-email brand locked in by then. skiff was the one trying to bolt encrypted docs onto the same story, with a calendar and a drive as the supporting cast. it was a more ambitious surface than proton mail had ever tried for, which is part of why notion noticed.

~ what got buried ~

the client source for the encrypted-docs piece was open. some of it stayed on github after the shutdown. but the hosted service was the product, and once notion turned the lights off the cold-start cost of running your own copy was basically the same as building from scratch.

notion has not shipped a privacy-encrypted note product since the acquihire. the skiff team works on whatever the next notion thing is. the close-to-two-million inboxes went somewhere, mostly back to gmail.

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