Space Monkey

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

~ the last words ~

Clint Gordon-Carroll and Alen Peacock met at Mozy in 2007, back when Mozy was the online backup product people actually used, and they left with a specific complaint about it. Cloud storage costs what the data center costs, and the data center is a building full of drives that somebody has to pay to cool. Meanwhile there were already hundreds of millions of hard drives sitting in houses, powered and connected and mostly idle.

Space Monkey, founded in Midvale, Utah in 2011, was the argument that those drives were the data center. You bought a box. The box held a terabyte and sat on your shelf, so your own files were local and instant. Behind that, every file was encrypted and then broken into pieces that lived on the boxes of other Space Monkey customers, so the backup copy sat in strangers' houses and no stranger could read it. The pitch landed immediately with the technical press: The Verge called it Dropbox meets BitTorrent, and CNET's headline was that it put the cloud in your house.

It won Best New Startup at TechCrunch's Launch Festival in March 2012 and raised a seed round with Google Ventures and Venture51 in it. The Kickstarter in April 2013 took $349,625 against a $100,000 goal, 350 percent of target. The product went live that same month. The pricing moved around: early coverage quoted $10 a month, and by 2014 the homepage was advertising $49 a year with the device paid for up front. At some point in that stretch, by the company's own description, it was the largest peer-to-peer storage network in the world.

On 10 September 2014 Forbes ran the exclusive: Vivint, a Utah home-automation and alarm company, had bought Space Monkey for an undisclosed amount. The site kept selling the device for more than two years after that, and then became a different product under the same address.

~ the record ~

~ a hard drive in every house ~

Everything attractive about the design was also the reason it was hard to sell. Your backup copy lives on hardware owned by people you have never met, in houses whose owners can unplug the box or move away. The encryption answers the privacy question completely and answers the availability question not at all, so the whole system rests on having enough nodes that enough of them are up at any moment. The product works properly once it is already popular, and not before.

It also assumed an American home connection. A network that reassembles your files out of other people's houses is a network that lives or dies on upload speed, and the device shipped to the United States only. Turkish ADSL of 2013 gave you a download figure worth advertising and an upload figure nobody printed, so a distributed design of this shape never arrived in Turkey at all, which is a different outcome from arriving and failing.

Dropbox had the opposite problem and solved it with money. By 2013 the consumer storage price per gigabyte was in free fall anyway, dragged down by Google and Amazon running their own buildings at a scale nobody could undercut by being clever. Space Monkey's economics were genuinely better. It did not help, because the number on the competitor's pricing page kept falling toward zero regardless.

~ what vivint took ~

Vivint is a home security company. It installs alarms and cameras in American suburbs, and cameras produce video, and video has to go somewhere that is not a monthly cloud bill per customer. Space Monkey's distributed storage was exactly the right shape for that problem, and Vivint's public writing was still crediting Space Monkey's technology as late as February 2016.

The consumer product took a while to die. The archive shows spacemonkey.com still carrying its own marketing and a Buy Now button through 30 December 2016, with a 2014 copyright line at the bottom that had not been touched in two years. By 21 April 2017 the same address is a Vivint page: Smart Drive at the top, storing thirty days of home camera footage, and underneath it a cloud storage product described as like Amazon S3 but at a fraction of the cost, marked "Available soon".

~ the name kept moving ~

By February 2018 spacemonkey.com was a beta signup for an object-storage service priced against the giants directly: $3.50 a month per terabyte against Amazon's $21 and Google's $18, with ten gigabytes free. The same engineering, aimed at developers instead of households, under the same monkey logo.

In 2019, with the founders gone, people inside Vivint who had come from Space Monkey spun the technology out into a majority-owned company called CrowdStorage, which chased the same idea with partners instead of consumers. CrowdStorage was later acquired by Storj, where the original code still runs inside a decentralized storage platform. So the idea has outlived the company by over ten years and has changed its name at each handover. The box on the shelf, which was the part an ordinary person could hold, is the only piece of it that stayed dead.

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