About SilentSuite

Who am I?

I’m Tim Ross, the founder and maintainer of SilentSuite.

I believe a lot in privacy and had been looking for quite some time to start a project in that space (I had already been consulting for quite some time). So, when looking at what tools I use and love and what is missing, I found calendars, contacts and tasks to be the things where there is not yet a perfect solution.

I value privacy

But I also value my privacy. That’s why I choose not to disclose where exactly I am from, where the business is operating and so on. Should you just trust me? No, the sync server, the clients and the whole code are open source. You can check it out, investigate it, fork it and use it. You don’t even have to do anything with the hosted server, you can freely self-host SilentSuite.

Still, I get a lot of questions about who I am. I think it shouldn’t matter. What should matter is the code, the quality of the code and the software. You can inspect the code yourself, and it should not matter where I am from. What would you gain from that? You would have a business name, an address, a country? But what would that tell you? I think this is also the part that can be faked most easily, so instead of lying and just telling you something, I will just tell you that I choose to stay pseudonymous with this business.

I hope you can understand and comprehend this situation that I am in and my decision. If you don’t, you should not use the product. That’s the beauty of a free market. You can choose for yourself what you want to support and buy and what not :)

The team behind SilentSuite

I lead a small team, working with freelance and part-time collaborators, spread across the world, including Argentina, India and Czechia, to help me with programming, marketing and social media.

About the project

So my goal is to make this useful, end-to-end encrypted, user-friendly sync, without giving the hosted server a readable copy of your calendar events, address book or task contents. The goal is to do all that without sacrificing convenience, so you can still use most of the open-source apps you already love.

Built on existing open-source work

SilentSuite builds on the Etebase protocol and the EteSync open-source lineage. The Android client also carries work from DAVx5 and bitfire’s Android libraries. I did not invent a new cryptographic system, but still, SilentSuite is an independent project with the main focus on having this encryption while also being user-friendly and maintained.

Why I keep building it

As I said before, I am a big believer in privacy. I think everyone should have it and that there should be more tools and software to make it as easy as possible to use privacy services. That’s the main reason why I am building SilentSuite (there is also a monetary side, but my expenses right now are a ton higher than what the current subscriptions bring in. Let’s see if that changes, but for now I am really happy to invest my money and also most of my waking time into this project).

You are free to decide

Paid hosted subscriptions support the service and its development. Self-hosting the open-source server is another option. Your calendar and contact data can be exported in standard formats, including ICS and VCF, with bulk export available as ZIP.

Export, public source and self-hosting give you practical options if your needs change. Keep independent backups of data you rely on.

Questions about the project are welcome at info@silentsuite.io. Bug reports and contribution discussions can also go through the public repository. Please use the published security contact rather than including sensitive details in a public issue.

Contributors and acknowledgments

Alongside our working team, contributors from the open-source community help improve SilentSuite. Thanks to:

Thank you as well to people who report problems (and test a lot, give a lot of feedback, and don’t give up on the whole project when something still doesn’t work fully in the beta), test releases, suggest improvements or help with documentation.

Follow the project on GitHub

If you would like to follow SilentSuite, you can star the public repository.

View SilentSuite on GitHub