The following notice was sent to all ResourceConnect administrators on December 2nd, 2025:

Hello,

This email is to let you know that unfortunately ResourceConnect will be shutting down as of April 9th, 2026.

A longer explanation as to why I've come to this unfortunate decision is below. But first some practical things for those of you who need to find another service for your web/SMS chat needs.

As of now all billing has been turned off for ResourceConnect. So the system will be 100% free for everyone for the remainder of the time you use it.

If you're just looking for a web chat, your transition to a new service should be less complicated. Simply find and acquire a new web chat service and follow that new service's instructions to get the new web chat on your organization's webpage.

If you're looking for SMS chat, you'll need to get your phone number transferred from our account to your new service's account. Every other SMS chat service I'm aware of uses the same telecommunications provider as we do, a company called Twilio. Twilio makes it relatively easy to transfer phone numbers between accounts. [CONTACT US FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS ON WHAT TO DO. THE EMAILED INSTRUCTIONS CONTAINED INFORMATION WE DON'T WANT TO POST PUBLICLY]

If your new service doesn't use Twilio, the phone number will have to be "ported" from our Twilio account to the other service. The process to do this may be similar to porting a cell phone number from one company to another. Every company does this differently and has different requirements. But just make sure to ask your new provider whether during the porting process there will be a period of time where your number is between accounts and messages to the number will be lost. If you do a Twilio-to-Twilio switch you shouldn't have any period of time where messages get lost.

For the remaining few months of ResourceConnect, support will be focused on making sure you're able to transition away from the service. But I would appreciate if you first asked your new provider questions about how to move to their service; they should easily support you through this process.

I do not have any suggestions or recommendations about other providers. All the other companies providing this service seem to be not-blatantly-evil.


Now... to give you as much information about this decision as I possibly can as I understand how disruptive this could be to your work and is something I do not take lightly.

First, it's become increasingly difficult to provide ongoing support for ResourceConnect. The issues ResourceConnect customers face typically require someone with high, and very specific, technical knowledge. With my responsibilities leading both EmpowerDB and ResourceConnect, I cannot be the one to provide the level of support needed and have consistently failed at finding other people to take this responsibility.

This also ties into my other major failure: my pricing of the product. My pricing assumed a higher number of subscribers and a lower number of ongoing support needs. With the money ResourceConnect makes, I just can't afford to hire someone with the technical knowledge needed to provide quality support. I imagine many of you could theoretically afford a quadrupling of your monthly rates. But I also imagine a good amount of you would cancel your service, which would mean I'd need to make even more money from those remaining. This would be on top of our steady decline in customers over the last few years.

Part of the reason for loss of customers could be attributed to the reduction in need for a platform like ResourceConnect post-COVID. Or it could be because of funding cutbacks resulting in difficult choices being made about extra expenses. But I do suspect the decline is in big part due to ResourceConnect not keeping up with new features.

ResourceConnect's development stalled so dramatically because our other platform EmpowerDB has continued to see extraordinary growth. For the past few years I haven't been able to keep up with hiring and training for EmpowerDB's needs; so I've consistently been unable to fathom how I could also attempt to revitalize ResourceConnect. Looking ahead to next year, I know the pattern will surely continue. And even if somehow I saw a clear path forward to re-focus on ResourceConnect by late next year, by then I would surely have even fewer customers to build this new foundation off of.

Next, ResourceConnect was built with security and confidentiality as the absolute top priority. But I've come to get the sense that most of our customers don't actually share the same focus; or awareness of the limitations that come along with confidentiality. I'm constantly having to explain (to very well meaning people!) how certain desires just don't align with my understanding of how to provide confidential support. Meanwhile, every other platform is happy to abide with all of these requests. So my taking a stand for confidentiality only results in me having one less customer and the organization still getting what they wanted; just from another company.

You may be reading this feeling like the security and confidentiality pieces ARE important to you. That is very nice if so. But there just doesn't seem to be enough of that mentality to build a sustainable chat platform that has that extreme focus on security and confidentiality. Our other platform, EmpowerDB, also is built on security and confidentiality. And I also sometimes don't get the sense that most EmpowerDB customers primarily care about that either. But with EmpowerDB I've been able to also add features that far surpass our competitors. And those features are what I believe has actually been the key to that platform's growth. The extra security and confidentiality just seem to be the cherry on top. I wish it could have been different for ResourceConnect and the same formula could have been applied there.

And finally, some of the technology that ResourceConnect was built on has shown to be too unreliable. A lot of the consistent support requests I keep getting would be solved with a total re-write of the system's chat functionality. But this would take an incredible amount of time and money.

So to put it all together, in order for ResourceConnect to be successful in the long term it needed to charge much more, be completely rebuilt, and have a dedicated and highly skilled person be put in charge. I've had the plan for the past three years now to make all that happen "next year". But "next year" never comes because of how much our other platform routinely requires my attention... and because the task of rebuilding ResourceConnect gets more complicated every day... and because of my lack of faith that doing this rebuild would result in the wave of new customers needed in order to make the platform be sustainable.

I want to be very clear that so much of the above represents failures on my part. I sincerely apologize for not being able to keep up this service as you had expected and hoped... and causing you to go through the trouble of finding and learning a new service.

It's been an honor to be trusted by you and your organization with this important need. I hope you're able to find another service to provide this service without too much trouble.

-Steven Jenkins