We are closing the company behind FrontlineSMS.
We are sad to close the business, but we’re thankful to have had the runway to close on our own timeline and to take good care of our team. Frontline has always had the best team, objectively, and the only truly hard part of closing is knowing I have to find new excuses to work with these people. If you’d like to race me, get in touch.
FrontlineSMS was a product before it was an organization – and we’ve done the work to ensure it can continue to be a product long after we’re a company. We’ve spent the last two years rebuilding FrontlineSMS and, in a few weeks, we’ll release it as a free, fully open source, and downloadable product for Mac, Windows, and Linux – with code hosted in Github, full documentation in Zendesk, and access to all of it and our content at FrontlineSMS.com, which I’ll host in perpetuity. We will shut down our cloud-hosted service on August 31, 2021. We have already reached out to our existing clients and users – but if you have questions or need additional help, please reach out to support@frontlinesms.com.
As we’ve talked to users, the most common reaction (because we have great users) has been to offer condolences for the difficulty surrounding the decision to close. And we thank them, because doing this work – especially for the last few years – has been hard. But we also want you to know: this was the team’s choice. We have the pipeline and runway to keep going.
We are choosing to stop. We are closing for a range of reasons, but one of them – honestly – is to challenge the notion of success in this space. Companies do not need to be large, or go on forever, to succeed.
For the last 15 years, we’ve developed a suite of products and services that enabled us to support more inspirational (and difficult) work than any of us really imagined. It also brought us a more dedicated group of partners, team, and community than we could have hoped for. After a lot of initial philanthropic support, we have been a fully self-sustaining, open source company, focused on serving last-mile and disconnected populations, for the last 7 years. Our products have been continuously used by community groups, service providers, and national governments alike, reaching tens of thousands of people a year. Over the last 15 years, we’ve supported users in 200 countries around the world with primarily free tools and support. We’ve been part of peer-reviewed academic studies, ground-breaking journalism, and the transformational change of life-saving systems – both as subject and as service provider. We did all of this by working differently than a lot of other teams – in ways that were good and bad.
And, maybe because of that, we have never had the resources or stability to seriously address the scope of problems we still believe FrontlineSMS is capable of helping solve. Frontline never became any of the many visions of success that shaped how ICT4D (then civic tech, now public interest tech) were funded. We didn’t become technology titans, philanthropy darlings (you can age out), or the flaming sword of digital justice. We resisted becoming data brokers, refused to focus exclusively on technical users or rich markets, and never took investment. While we have been incredibly fortunate to work with exceptional people at every step of our journey, we needed their brilliance – because many of those steps were novel, misunderstood, and grueling.
Over the last 5 years, it’s become increasingly obvious that there aren’t adequate support infrastructures for public interest technology and, candidly, there never have been. The open source space (maybe?) works if you build developer-facing utilities, but it has proven to be an extremely difficult place to build independent, customer-facing products. Especially products aimed at connecting last-mile, offline communities to public and humanitarian services – in other words, the markets and people most services have already decided not to reach. But that was the work we signed up for – it was the work that brought so many brilliant people through our doors, and it is the toxic, personal costs of doing that work that convinced us it’s time to stop. The Frontline team aren’t heroes and, more importantly, we should not have to be martyrs.
What we did, instead, was a lot of solid, common sense work in ways that centered the people most technology teams don’t. I’d like to think that we took the responsibility of our values to heart and, in an environment that strongly pushed in the opposite direction, made operational and technical decisions in service of our ideals, instead of our ideal business.
Frontline’s core product and ethos were created at a time when there wasn’t acknowledgement of the ethics of technology, let alone a guidance on how to do it well. And let’s be clear - I, as CEO, didn’t lead Frontline anywhere close to as well as I should have. Certainly not as well, knowing what I know now, as I could have. Running a good technology company, as it turns out, is really different than running a company that uses technology to do good. And we chose the latter a lot more than we chose the former.
This is the first of a short series – the second will explain a bit more about the choices we made as a business; the third will explain the choices we made as a technology; and the last will be the choices (and lessons) I made as a leader – all in the hopes of explaining and sharing a few lessons learned for anyone building, or considering building, a technology company that’s good at doing good.
For now, it’s enough to say that we’re closing, that it’s been hard, and thank you for all of the support, partnership, and inspiration over the years. Closing isn’t easy to see as success, but I’m proud of where we’ve got to, who it enabled us to help and become, and whoever carries Frontline forward.
More soon.
\o/
Sean