# Sunsetting gosumdb
Saturday, 13. September 2025


I will be shutting down the [gosumdb witness](https://gosumdb.raphting.dev) by the end of **September 2025**.

This project serves as a witness for Go's transparency log. This post won't cover the technical details but will instead
explain the reasons for this decision. For a deep dive into what the gosumdb witness does and how it works, you can read
my three-part series:

* [Article 1](https://raphting.dev/posts/gosumdb-p1/)
* [Article 2](https://raphting.dev/posts/gosumdb-p2/)
* [Article 3](https://raphting.dev/posts/gosumdb-p3/)

### Why the Shutdown?

The simple reason is **high resource consumption**, which translates to cost.

The project's data tiles require **11 GB of disk space**, and its periodic calculations consume up to **8 GB of RAM** to
check for duplicates. While disk space is inexpensive, RAM on hosted virtual machines is costly, especially for a
personal project that isn't mission-critical.

To save money, I am sunsetting the service. Although the performance could be improved (for example, by changing the
duplicate check to be on-disk instead of in-memory), I don't currently have the time to invest in re-engineering it.

I hope this project helped make the concepts of transparency logs and witnesses more accessible and perhaps sparked some
interest in cryptography. When I launched gosumdb two years ago, someone reached out to learn more, which confirmed that
the project served as a learning tool for at least one person.

![gosumdb webpage](https://raphting.dev/img/gosumdb.png)

If you want to explore this topic further:

* Filippo Valsorda explains how you can [run your own certificate transparency log](https://words.filippo.io/run-sunlight/).
* WhatsApp has
  also [deployed a transparency log](https://engineering.fb.com/2023/04/13/security/whatsapp-key-transparency/), which,
  to my knowledge, does not yet have a public witness.


By Raphael Sprenger