from:	Andrei Soroker <andrei@kato.im>
reply-to:	Andrei Soroker <andrei@kato.im>
to:	***@***
date:	Mon, Jul 13, 2015 at 4:50 PM
subject:	Kato shutting down
signed-by:	reply-to.in

Hello!

I'm sad to report that we unfortunately have to shut down Kato. The last day of service will be August 31, 2015.

THE DATA
You can export your entire Kato history here: https://app.kato.im/#/account/export (or My Account->Export History). Click the button and within a few minutes you’ll get a zip archive with JSON and text versions of all your 1-1s and rooms.

WHY
In short—Slack ate the world and we failed to gain traction. Our SAML- and SCIM-enabled enterprise product had no takers from larger companies. The unique Kato features that made it stand out from the competition—proper multi-team support, swim-lane multi-chat design, great search, Vim-based keyboard shortcuts, the fast-forward button (esp. on mobile), and flexible group mentions—weren't unique enough to get a critical mass of people publicly excited about the product.

All this forced us to stop working on Kato in January—we "pivoted" the company to Sameroom.io, the multi-protocol gateway that connects chatrooms across services.

We were hoping to keep Kato running on autopilot indefinitely—to wait things out, but our software eventually disagreed: the service started getting sick, causing annoying issues on a daily basis.

Since we are committed to operating with 100% uptime and we can no longer give it our best effort, we have to kill Kato. It’s a pity.

WILL WE OPEN-SOURCE
Not at the moment, it will take too much time to do this properly.

ARE YOU SERIOUS?
I'll be running a Kato Sunset Conference on August 4—if you'd like to participate, please register here: http://ccst.io/e/andreisoroker1

Andrei
CEO, Kato (and Sameroom)

p.s. We still have some Kato t-shirts left. Tell me your preferred size/gender and I’ll send you one if we have a match.