We stand on the shoulders of giants. 8by3 wouldn't exist without the people who give away the foundations we build on, and the small, principled companies we're happy to pay so they can keep doing what they do.
FreeBSD
Every 8by3 service runs on FreeBSD. Jails and ZFS give us isolation and snapshots without the operational tax of containers-on-Linux. Three decades of careful engineering, and it still feels like the most honest operating system around.
PostgreSQL
Every byte of 8by3 state lives in Postgres. Transactions that mean what they say, a query planner that earns its keep, JSON when you want it, and a thirty-year track record of never losing your data. The unglamorous workhorse that quietly makes everything else possible.
Elixir
The whole stack is Elixir. Pattern matching, supervision trees, and the BEAM's "let it crash" mean we ship features that would be weeks of defensive plumbing in other languages. A language that makes hard things feel inevitable.
Phoenix Framework
LiveView is why a tiny team can ship apps that feel like SPAs without an SPA. Real-time updates, presence, and forms-that-just-work. The Phoenix team turned a research idea into the most productive web framework we've used.
deSEC
DNS done as a public good. Nonprofit, free, DNSSEC by default, a clean API, and run by people who care more about a healthy internet than about a billing model. Every 8by3 domain points here.
→ desec.io
MailPace
Transactional email that just delivers. No bloat dashboard, no "engagement" theatre, no quietly downgrading your sender reputation. Per-domain keys, simple webhooks for inbound, and pricing that doesn't punish a small umbrella running ten sender domains.
Fastmail
Our day-to-day mail lives at Fastmail. A real company building real IMAP, JMAP, calendars, and contacts, not an AI sidecar pretending to be email. They've spent twenty-plus years quietly proving you can run a great mail host without surveilling the inbox.
Backblaze
The backups quietly land at Backblaze every night. B2 is the rare cloud storage product that's priced like a utility instead of a casino. Predictable, S3-compatible enough, and run by a company that publishes hard-drive failure stats because they actually want you to know.
sourcehut
Git hosting without the social network. No issues-as-engagement, no JavaScript-heavy UI, no ML scraping your repos for someone else's training run. Just git, mailing lists, and CI, the way forges worked before they became platforms. We pay for an account because work like Drew's deserves to be funded directly, not through ads or surveillance. Our open-source releases ship through sr.ht.