Automattic and WordPress are huge proponents of open source software so we’re happy to be able to go forward with our plans to open up the code, starting with the iOS and JavaScript client libraries. In the short term we’ll also be moving to faster hardware, so overall performance and stability of the hosted service should improve.

We’re going to keep expanding Simperium as a tool for building apps. Adding Simperium to apps that can work from a local datastore lets you automatically synchronize data across different instances and platforms. This way of building apps feels natural, a model where the developer can focus purely on the data itself, not networking or APIs. Synchronizing data is just part of the problem though. We’ll be adding better support for things like binary syncing and collaboration, along with a wider variety of client libraries.

Automattic is a distributed company with employees all over the world. They understand the value and importance of collaborative tools. While Simperium currently provides a great way to synchronize data, we also want to make it easier to do things like creating and managing groups of people that need access to the same data, sharing presence information, and showing authors of changes. These are problems that come up again and again when building a collaborative app.

There are still plenty of challenges along the way. If these problems sound interesting, you might consider working with us from wherever you may be in the world.

We spoke to a lot of you over the past few weeks. We know trust is key. You can’t commit to a service without knowing how it sustains itself, or what will happen if it goes away. With that in mind, we’re announcing pricing today together with our open source strategy.

Pricing

The Basic Plan is free and gives you access to all features for development and prototyping, and up to 2,500 active users per month for production.

Beyond that, a Pro Plan supports 2,501 to 75,000 active monthly users for $99 to $1499 per month. For those with more than 75,000 active monthly users, or if your needs don’t map well to active users, a Premium Plan is available with volume discounts and custom pricing.

All plans include everything you need to move structured data across mobile, web, and your backend services, including persistence, versioning, firehose access, and conflict resolution on our hosted servers. Support for large binary data (like images and audio) is coming later.

Open source

Sometimes a hosted solution isn’t appropriate. Or perhaps you need maximum confidence and control. To that end, we’re open sourcing Simperium starting with our client libraries, and followed by our protocol with a reference server implementation.

Thanks to everyone who gave us feedback. We really appreciate it.

Developers seem to appreciate this focus. In practice, it means that going up the stack, Simperium can integrate with tools like Core Data, Backbone.js, and PhoneGap. And going down the stack, Simperium can work with providers like Heroku while integrating with services like Twilio and Urban Airship. We believe this downward flexibility is particularly important. You can create unique services that help your app stand out, and you maintain control of your data (compared to services like iCloud that lock it all away).

That’s the developer perspective. But we’re product people at heart. Simperium arose from Simplenote, which itself arose from our frustration with moving text between our computers and our phones. The lack of a good solution pained us. Our ultimate motivation today, as it was then, is to improve the lives of users.

When you use Simperium as your data layer, your users will never be blocked by network progress indicators. They’ll enjoy access to their data across all their devices. They’ll be able to work offline with full read/write access. And they’ll be able to share and collaborate with the simple act of associating an email address with some data.

That’s the world we want to live in. All these goals (and more that we’re not talking about yet) are about moving data. We see an opportunity to focus on moving data the same way Google focused on searching data, and we look forward to the many challenges and discoveries that lie ahead.