Haven development paused
tl;dr: We paused Haven development due to of the increased cost of RAM and NVMe storage due to the AI bubble, which made it impossible to sell for any reasonable price. All VIP deposits have been refunded.
For many of you who’ve been on this journey with us for a while, you know that we started with a simple idea, how to make remote music collaboration with others dead simple. This idea was borne out of the pandemic, when all of us were stuck at home, but none of the itch to create music had disappeared.
We ended up making an app, now called Relay, that tried to address the many papercuts that happen when you’re swapping files back and forth with someone, trying your best to stay collaborative and creative in the morass of file names, file versions, comments, mix revisions, and the like.
We were very proud of what we built. We had users who ended up building entire albums with it, and others who began collaborating again with friends after many years of a creative desert. It was excactly for this reason we built the app.
We then tried to figure out a way to sustain the company through selling a premium version of the app, including additional storage, unlocked features, and the like. It did okay, but not great. It turns out most people, (including us!) really don’t like subscriptions. It was hard to ask our users to do something we ourselves weren’t thrilled to do.
It also turns out that while Relay was (and still is!) pretty fantastic at lots of things, there there were a couple areas where it fell short, due to no fault of its own. Frankly, dealing with lots of large files that need to synchronize reliably and immediately is hard to do when everything’s stored in the cloud.
In addition, about this time we were starting to see the rise of AI, and some unscrupulous cloud providers deciding to take it upon themselves to point their AI training efforts towards people’s private audio files. Not cool at all.
This led us down the path of rethinking what it might look like to have a dedicated, local piece of hardware that was basically Relay, but local to your studio and your DAW. This let us have both blazing file speeds (Thunderbolt 5 @ 120Gb/s!) and guarantee privacy of your most important creative work, with it never leaving your studio.
How then, does one collaborate with another if the files are on a device in their studio? That’s where some of the magic lives in how we architected the ability for Havens to connect securely and directly with each other, no cloud necessary.
Unfortunately, just as we pre-launched our Kickstarter campaign to begin gathering VIP backer deposits, the craziest thing happened. The global market for RAM and NVMe storage exploded due to the AI bubble. And as we kept updating our cost spreadsheet, it kept getting more ridiculous. Below is a screenshot of our actual spreadsheet, as we kept updating pricing for these items.
It soon became clear that there’s no way to offer Haven for any reasonable price at this time. We’ll have to wait until RAM and storage reduce in price, and so for the foreseeable future, we’ve put Haven on hold.
It’s bittersweet because we spent a ton of time spec’ing, designing, and engineering what we think is a pretty killer product. And we had some manufacturing lined up to begin building them once the campaign had concluded. It’s because of this effort of what we already designed, that we keep the Haven page up on our site. So you can see a bit about how we think, how we design products, and how sometimes putting a product launch on hold is the right thing for our customers.
The sweet part of it is that we get to move to our next product launch, one that has no memory or storage constraints.
We hope you join us in supporting the launch of Grid, and be sure to follow along on our design journey on Youtube, where we plan to document the Grid product development process, from idea to launch. We love making quality products that people love, and we want you to join us in the experience!
If you have a question about Haven or your refund, write to contact@tonicaudio.com.
Relay continues as its own product, for projects, files, and collaboration for audio teams. It’s free to use.