After almost 10 years of providing mostly uninterrupted service to thousands of users worldwide in the Satellite Earth Observation industry, we've learned a thing or two.
It turned out - to our great and rather painful surprise - that building globally accessible, large-scale platforms as a small, bootstrapped company, in an emerging industry where software sits low on the priority list, is a bit challenging. As if space tech wasn't hard enough, right? But if we didn't like challenges, we'd have quit years ago. Come to think of it, we wouldn't have started at all.
So last September, after about two years of indecision about the new version, we concluded it was time to finally build something new from scratch. Something the little EO nerd inside us has always wanted. Something we'd meant to build from the start - we just didn't know how, back when we began around 2016. Those years were Phase 1 of our long-term vision, and spectator.earth was its flagship.
We always built this platform around how we'd want to interact with EO satellites - not around project requirements, and not by mimicking what already exists. It took a lot of trial and error, and a lot of listening to you, to get here - which meant completely redefining spectator.earth (domain included ;)). So almost a decade after our first release, Phase 1 is complete, and today we're moving into Phase 2: obsearth.com. We can confidently say it's the best tool we've built so far.
And Phase 3? It won't happen without the same thing that made Phase 2 possible: You.
obsearth.com is here, and it's free to explore. If it earns a place in your workflow, a subscription is what keeps us independent and keeps Phase 3 coming - no investors, no roadmap we didn't choose, just us and the people who use this.
Best,
Obsearth Team
