Driky / postage

Postage - A fast replacement for PGAdmin.

Important News - Please Read

The old README is HERE

The Workflow Products Team has decided that we've accomplished our goals with Postage.

We've learned a lot through this journey. We're very fortunate that we've had this opportunity to serve the PostgreSQL community and we wish everyone well.

I'm going to look back on our goals first. If you're here to read about the future of Postage, please skip down.

As I write this, we've broken 1200 new users in the last thirty days. Unfortunately, it took eighteen months or so to get to a point where Postage finds users on its own. That is mostly on us. I'm sure if we had better quality control and did more internal beta testing that we would have gained the confidence of the community sooner. We made a lot of mistakes that turned users away. For example, up until very recently, Postage required superuser privileges to log in to a database. Also, there was a login timeout that annoyed people.

I won't go into the full list but there were a lot of those issues over the course of Postage's development. Finding them and overcoming those obstacles really taught us a lot. We're indebted to everyone who complained or submitted issues. You have our thanks.

The Good News

2ndQuadrant has released OmniDB

We now have two free, open source projects (PGAdmin4 and OmniDB) that promise to be truly fast replacements for the old dog PGAdmin3. We are aware that PGAdmin4 has had quality control issues in the beginning, but this latest release shows that the PGAdmin team is working hard toward fixing the issues and more importantly, making PGAdmin4 a fast tool.

The primary goal of Postage was to set the bar for free clients to include high performance. It's the reason we wrote the first version way back in 2013 for internal use. We wrote it to fill a gap, and it would seem that gap has been filled. We feel like the community will finally be served by those companies that earn the most off PostgreSQL and that is as it should have been all along.

We wish EnterpriseDB/PGAdmin4 and 2ndQuadrant/OmniDB all the best.

The Future of Postage

At this point Postage is working pretty well. This last release had something like forty issues closed. Unfortunately, that just isn't sustainable and as a result, Postage is at a crossroads.

At this time, our best option seems to be to remove the Postage repo from Github.

Other options we've considered include:

1. Entertain another potential sponsor. Not likely to be worth it. Hard to trust anyone at this point.

2. Start charging for Postage. Now that there are two viable free competitors it would be unlikely we would get any sales (which was actually the point of Postage!).

3. We could turn over the code base to someone. Unfortunately, there haven't been any contributors that have participated in the project. Postage will be associated with our company for some time, it would be a bad idea to turn it over to someone who hasn't participated in the project before now.

4. We could leave it up on Github but abandon it. That would not be good advertising for our company. Probably a bad idea.

5. Continue supporting Postage and live with the consequences. We aren't about to lose our house or anything, but we can't start another project that might help us financially while we're devoting two full time people to Postage. We want to make it clear, now that OmniDB has proven to be viable as a Postage replacement, our sacrifices will be in vain because they will no longer materially benefit the community.

6. Leave Postage up but start a new project that the PostgreSQL community would buy. Then use the proceeds to keep Postage alive. We have a lot of ideas but no indication from the community that they would be profitable. Creating software like this is so easy to do now that it's likely that if we did find a successful tool there would very quickly be free tools from the big companies in the space.

We'll be making a decision Friday, September 1, 2017. If you'd like to make a constructive suggestion please comment HERE or contact us directly at [phone] during US/CST daytime hours.