Sonnet was one of the best-known crowdfunded off-grid communication devices of 2017, funded and promised, then gone quiet. If you're here because you need something that actually works today, Nelos is a modern, actively maintained app built on the same idea - the timeline below is for background.
The short question is: the project raised a lot of money, promised delivery, and then what? The answer has to separate the stages, because "announced", "crowdfunded", "had a prototype", "promised shipping", "verified shipping and commercialisation" and "later status" are different things, and the evidence for each is not the same.
Sonnet was developed by Sonnet Labs, a company in Toronto, Canada. The Kickstarter campaign, titled "Sonnet: World's Most Advanced Off-Grid Mobile Mesh Network", ran in the summer of 2017 with a goal of $17,000 and raised about $226,000 from around 1,700 backers - far past the goal. The project then continued raising money on Indiegogo. The stated estimated delivery date was November 2017.
According to the campaign, Sonnet was a rugged, water-resistant pocket device (IP66) with a 4,000 mAh battery that doubled as a power bank, pairing to a phone through a Wi-Fi access point accessed via a web app at app.sonnetlabs.com. It used a proprietary radio protocol (chirp spread spectrum modulation, the same family as LoRa) in the 915/868/433 MHz bands, and was marketed with messaging, voice recordings, images, GPS sharing, offline maps, an SOS button and AES encryption. How that design differs from today's open LoRa mesh ecosystem is covered in Sonnet vs LoRa mesh.
The November 2017 delivery date was missed. Post-campaign updates gave reasons: an industrial redesign of the enclosure for strength and water resistance, and - more significantly - FCC and CE certification hurdles that required changes to the long-range radio module. These pushed the timeline back repeatedly.
There is evidence that some devices reached backers around 2019. A write-up reconstructing one early recipient's setup reported that chat between two devices worked, but the mesh functions did not; that official documentation was missing and some support pages returned 404 errors; and estimated that the project by then had "maybe 1 or 2 people" working on fulfilment. Over the same period, many backers on both Kickstarter and Indiegogo said they were still waiting.
Public campaign updates appear to thin out and stop around late 2020. After that, the public record becomes very sparse.
As of this research (September 2026), the domains sonnetlabs.com and app.sonnetlabs.com no longer resolve in DNS - meaning the official website and the web app the device needed in order to operate are both offline.
From the public sources available, the following remain unclear, and this article does not assert them:
No public evidence points to a specific "shutdown" date, a bankruptcy or a formal discontinuation announcement - only a successfully funded project that shipped late and partially, then went quiet.
If you have a Sonnet, see Does Sonnet Mesh Still Work? If you liked the idea, Nelos is a modern app that delivers it today - group chat, offline maps, trackers and a Need Help button, on hardware from several makers rather than one company. See the Sonnet off-grid communicator concept, done today or go straight to Getting Started.
Nelos brings group messaging, location sharing, and a shared group map with location updates to LoRa mesh — with no cell service, no server, and no account.
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