What’s next for Cluster
Hi, I’m Taylor Hughes. I’m a software engineer. I have shipped apps and built teams at Clubhouse, Facebook, Google and a bunch of start-ups in between.
Over the last few months, Cluster, an app I helped launch in 2013, has been facing an existential crisis: The service isn’t able to cover its costs anymore, and the current owners were going to shut it down.
I’m still one of Cluster’s daily active users, and so is my family. As a result, I have decided to jump back in and help try to make the service sustainable.
This weekend, we sent this letter out to explain what’s going on and to seek feedback on what the platform could do better:
Hello Cluster Fan,
I’m Taylor, one of the founders of Cluster who built the app almost 10 years ago. I have some exciting news — Cluster is not going away! I’m jumping back in to invest and help update Cluster to make it more sustainable. So the service you’ve grown to love is not only sticking around, it’s going to get much better!
For a little background, we started building Cluster just after Apple launched the iPhone 5 in 2012. Our small team originally built the app to share vacation photos, but we quickly discovered how great it could be for families, schools, businesses, and everything in between.
A lot has changed over the last 10 years. iOS and Android have been redesigned half a dozen times, and the underlying tech that runs Cluster has changed dramatically. Personally, I got married, changed jobs a few times, and now have a three-year-old son.
Throughout this time, Cluster itself has been a constant: My family has been able to watch my son grow up through this app! My parents and in-laws have told me about how they wake up each morning, check Cluster, and see if there are any new snapshots of their grandson. It is literally the only app I use that consistently makes me happy.
However, financially, Cluster is at a crossroads. One thing people don’t often think about is how much it costs to run the apps we love. Cluster itself has always been free, and over the last 5 years, photo book printing has helped cover the costs. But photo books aren’t something people buy often, and it’s been hard to keep up with our substantial data transfer and storage bills.
So, we’ve decided to add subscription options to the service, where you can optionally upgrade your account and help support the app to get access to an enhanced experience. We’ve run some numbers and hope that if we make the subscription option appealing to enough people who love the app as much as we do, we can keep it running as an independent business indefinitely.
To that end, I would love your thoughts on what you’d like to see with Cluster over the next few months; it will help me a lot as I roll up my sleeves and get to work.
Please follow us on Twitter at @Cluster or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/getcluster — we’ll start posting more updates there soon and would love your feedback.
Best,
Taylor
Thanks for reading, and if you’re a Cluster user, please do reach out and let me know what we could be doing better on Twitter (tag @Cluster!) or email: taylor [at] cluster’s domain.
