Vesper

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

~ the obituary ~

vesper was the kind of indie app you knew about only if you followed the apple-developer blogosphere. john gruber's daring fireball was the central node of that scene. brent simmons had been writing netnewswire since 2002 and brought the longstanding mac-cocoa cred, while dave wiskus handled the design side with a smaller but well-respected following from his work on agile tortoise. the three of them set up q branch in december 2012 to ship a single app together. vesper shipped on june 5, 2013, as an iphone-only paid notes app with tags and attached photos. the typography pass read like a love letter to apple's pre-flat ios. the apple-press write-ups were uniformly affectionate.

the app sold well enough at launch to feel viable. then it ran into the same wall that almost every paid productivity app on ios hit during 2013 and 2014. apple's own notes app was free and getting better. icloud sync became a default, not a feature you paid extra for. the addressable market for a careful $2.99 download was shrinking and the customers who did pay tended to pay once and never again. q branch added vesper sync as a subscription in 2014 to try to convert that one-shot revenue into something recurring. the math still did not work.

brent simmons took a job at the omni group in september 2014, which gruber later wrote was the moment the writing was on the wall. the team kept the app updated through 2015, but no new platform was ever shipped. mac and ipad versions were planned and abandoned. on august 22, 2016 gruber posted the goodbye, vesper, adieu, with the schedule of what would happen next. the sync server shut down on august 30. the app went free in the meantime so existing users could export their notes as json. on september 15, 2016 the app was pulled from the store. q branch dissolved soon after.

i was 29 when vesper shipped and not in the audience. the paid-ios-app press circuit was a small american thing, the kind of english-language internet pocket that produced loud opinions about typography and software pricing without ever quite reaching turkey's app-store top charts. my notes lived in google keep by then because that worked on android, on web, and in chrome on a windows desktop without paying anyone. vesper was the app i read about every few months on six colors or daring fireball and never installed.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was for ~

the pitch was a notes app that respected your eyes and your time. you typed a note, you tagged it, you maybe attached a photo, and the typography did most of the rest of the work. there was no folder hierarchy and no rich text. there were no collaborative cursors. the app deliberately did one small thing well and refused to expand its scope past that. for a certain sliver of the ios audience this was exactly correct. for everyone else apple notes was already there and free, and the more aggressive paid notes apps like bear and drafts were going to do more for a similar price.

~ the sync trap ~

vesper sync arrived in 2014 as a free service for existing customers and a small recurring fee for new ones. the calculus was that recurring revenue could carry the team. the actual outcome was that sync turned into the most expensive part of the operation. running a sync backend for a paid notes app means standing up servers and watching for failure modes while paying for storage that grows with every active user. q branch was three people. the sync infrastructure was a fourth headcount the company could not afford. paid-ios indie shops would learn this same lesson over and over through 2014 to 2018, with sparrow, mailbox, astrid, and pinswift all hitting some version of the same wall.

~ what got buried with it ~

the goodbye post that gruber published was unusually candid. it admitted that they never made enough money and that the iphone-paid-app market had narrowed past the point where a team of three could survive on a single app. the post became a small reference document in apple-developer circles, cited whenever another indie ios studio announced it was sunsetting a beloved product. vesper itself is now a four-letter footnote, more remembered for what the goodbye implied about paid-ios economics than for what the app did. notes are still notes. the typography is still good, only nobody can run the app anymore.

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