Mergebot

Re: Shutting down Mergebot

TL;DR – Mergebot didn’t meet our quality standards so we shut it down permanently on August 17, 2018.

Mergebot is by far the most ambitious product we’ve ever attempted. When we set out to solve WordPress’ database merging problems at our company retreat in 2015, I knew there was a very good chance that we wouldn’t be able to pull it off. But we went ahead anyway. It was the right time to attempt a moonshot. And although I’m very proud of the technology we’ve built over the last three years, our solution doesn’t reach the high standards that we aim for with all of our products.

If you’ve recorded a lot of queries, the app can take a very long time to process those queries. The processing that is required to ensure data integrity is very intensive and requires a lot of power. Because of this many customers have experienced long waits for their deployments to run and some have had failures and timeouts.

For every plugin or theme that writes to the database, Mergebot needs to know how it stores its data so it can correctly handle IDs and conflicts. Although we tried to support as many plugins as possible ourselves, customers needed to manually configure unsupported plugins/themes which is often more of a pain than the database deployment problem itself.

These issues, among other things, add up to a product that we’re not happy with and can’t be proud of.

Without confidence in the foundation of our product, it would have been foolish to proceed with the next phase of development (team collaboration and multiple environments). And so after much deliberation about what to do, we’ve decided to shut it down.

On August 17, 2018 we permanently shut down Mergebot.

We understand that this is disappointing for many of you. You were hoping that we’d be able to crack this nut and maybe were even convinced that we would. We really appreciate you cheering us on! It allowed us to persevere when things got tough.

But we got tired of breaking through brick wall after brick wall and found it was time to move on to problems with fewer, thinner walls. And we’ve been moving quickly.

Watch for two new products coming from us soon:

• A plugin to send your WordPress site emails through Amazon SES for low-cost high-deliverability sending
• An app that will allow you to spin up your own server optimized to host WordPress in minutes

If you have any questions or concerns about the Mergebot shutdown, let us know.

Thank you for supporting Mergebot.

Brad Touesnard Founder & CEO Delicious Brains, Inc.